Our process for reviewing hosting providers
If you’ve landed on this page, it means that you read our “How we do reviews.“ callout in a specific hosting review that we’ve done. We know this because this page is explicitly mentioned only in our hosting review articles and is, by default, set to be not indexed by search engines. Thank you for showing interest in our level of integrity.
About us. We’re webmasters at heart and have been building things on the web since 2005. The Stack Diary project was founded by Alex in late 2021, a few years after he handed his previous project (CodeCondo) off to new owners while he was focusing on getting his journalistic chops in order. Since 2021, this project has grown from a measly few hundred visitors a month to nearly 400,000 visitors a month, depending on the type of news and stories we publish. During this time, we have also built a strong reputation around our brand (as is explained on our advertising page), with mentions in editorials such as The New York Times, TechCrunch, The Verge, and many others. Unlike others who plaster “as seen in” logos on their landing pages and never back it up – we actually have the skin in the game and don’t need to boast about it.
Not all hosting is created equal
Web hosting comes in many different shapes and forms: shared, managed, virtual servers, dedicated servers, and niche-specific hosting, such as hosting specific to eCommerce, WordPress, and so on.
It’s an important distinction to understand because one can be an expert in shared hosting, for example, but have absolutely no idea how a Virtual Private Server (VPS) works because this is what the “dashboard” of a VPS server looks like:
As you can imagine, given our love for the more technical side of things – it’s really not that difficult for us to assess the quality of a practical shared hosting plan or any hosting service that provides a dashboard as opposed to direct access to the server.
By comparison, this is what our Namecheap dashboard looks like:
And on top of this, you have to consider individual quirks and features that each individual hosting provider has to offer. Typically, we’ll focus on the most important features for a specific “hosting type”, and, if necessary – do a deep dive in a separate (dedicated) review.
That said, the general benchmarks we’re looking to cover for each hosting provider are as follows:
- When did the hosting provider launch its services? More years in the game equals more experience.
- What kind of support can you expect? In some cases, being able to call technical support is far more efficient than sifting through endless live chat sessions.
- What about load times? We do a rigorous performance test in three regions (USA, EU, and Asia) in increments of five unique tests for each region and then provide the average result.
- When necessary (such as for VPS hosting reviews) – we will also do an Apache benchmark and sometimes individual benchmarks for CPU, File IO, and MySQL.
- Because we are customers for every single platform that we review – we can always provide additional details or custom benchmarks upon request as long as you contact us.
Do we only write reviews for platforms we’re partnered with?
The answer to this question is no. Many of the hosting providers we talk about either don’t have affiliate programs at all or don’t offer affiliate partnerships in regions other than the ones they’re located in. Take, for example, SiteGround, an exceptional hosting provider that we quite often mention in our reviews but we have no direct affiliation with them.
Does that mean we lose revenue in the long term? Maybe, and maybe not. If some of these providers change their affiliate terms in the future, we won’t need to start from scratch as we’ll have done reviews for their platforms already. At the same time, giving you, the reader, the best possible options is really what it’s all about. In the future, you might be looking for a different type of hosting, and you’ll know that we don’t beat around the bush when it comes to prioritizing the best there is.
We’ll go to war for you
Well, not literally, anyway. What this means is that if you ever have any issues with a hosting provider that we have reviewed that you can’t solve on your own or you feel like you have been wronged – as long as you tell us, we’ll help you get to the bottom of it. Not only because we ourselves would never want to deal with incompetent services but also because we don’t want to recommend such services to any of our readers.
This, of course, has its limitations of how much we can actually do, but considering that our hosting reviews get substantial hits on a daily basis – it’s unlikely any hosting company is going to ignore our request to resolve an issue you have in a way that’s satisfactory for both sides. That’s our promise to you.
Our reviews are always up-to-date
Have you ever read a review for a product only to visit the said products page, and it says something completely different? I think a lot of us have been there, especially when it comes to things like pricing.
Hosting is a “volatile” space where hosting providers very often change their pricing, including discounts and special offers. And on top of that – they may adjust how a specific hosting type functions, or maybe it gets removed altogether. And the same goes for news announcements for any given company.
So, how do we deal with this? Our approach is rather simple; we use the changedetection.io software that lets us monitor pages in real time. Whenever a page has its contents changed, we get a notification. We’ve got this set up for every single hosting provider that we have reviewed, including individual pricing pages and other pages that may include important information.
If something changes and at that moment we’re at our desks, we’ll have an update ready to go within minutes.
If you have further questions, contact us.