Our Review Methodology

Every host on this site is reviewed against the same checklist using the same sources. This page explains exactly how that works — and what we deliberately don't claim.

Our Three Data Sources

Our reviews are built on three categories of input. We don't use anything else.

1. Provider data we collect and maintain

For each host we cover, we maintain a structured record of pricing (per game, per plan tier), supported games, advertised hardware, server locations, and feature availability (DDoS protection, MySQL, custom JAR support, Pterodactyl panel access, instant setup, and others). This data is sourced from each provider's public website and order pages, and is reviewed regularly. When a provider changes pricing or adds a feature, we update the underlying record.

2. Publicly verifiable facts about each company

Founding year, headquarters location, official game partnerships (e.g., G-Portal's ARK relationship, Nitrado's console hosting partnerships), and operational history. These are facts that can be cross-checked against company websites, press releases, and public records.

3. Community reputation

We read forums, subreddits (r/admincraft, r/playrust, r/dayz, etc.), long-running review threads, and the broader hosting community for patterns in user feedback. This isn't a polling exercise — we look for repeated, substantive observations that hold up over months and years rather than one-off complaints.

What We Don't Do

We are explicit about this because some affiliate review sites are not, and you deserve to know:

We don't publish fabricated benchmark numbers. If you see specific latency, TPS, or throughput numbers on an affiliate review site that aren't backed by methodology and timestamps, treat them as marketing rather than data.
We don't claim to have independently tested every provider. With 21+ hosting providers covered across 20+ games, comprehensive testing of every provider on every game is not feasible for a small team. We're honest about this rather than claiming otherwise.
We don't accept paid placements that override rankings. Affiliate commissions don't affect ranking order. A host paying us a higher commission rate cannot buy its way to a higher rank.

How Rankings Are Formed

Our rankings are use-case-driven rather than universal. A host that's the right answer for a budget vanilla Minecraft server is rarely the right answer for a heavily-modded ARK cluster. Our flagship guides (e.g., Best Minecraft Server Hosting, Best Rust Server Hosting) explicitly call out which use cases we ranked for and why.

Within a given use case, rankings combine: feature suitability for the workload, cost-per-spec at the relevant resource tier, hardware quality (where verifiable from published specs), feature gaps that would constrain the use case, and community reputation patterns. We weight these differently per category — performance hosting weights hardware higher than budget hosting does, for example.

How Often We Update

Provider data (pricing, plans, features) is reviewed on a rolling basis — when we're writing or updating a piece that touches a host, we re-verify their current public offerings before publishing. Major provider changes (new pricing, new locations, new features) trigger updates to the underlying review.

We don't auto-update our data via scraping. Each update is a deliberate human review, which means our data may lag the provider's website by days or weeks during pricing changes. If you spot something out of date, please let us know.

Conflict of Interest Policy

Every host we cover potentially pays us a commission when a reader signs up through our link. This means we have a financial interest in you choosing one of the hosts we list rather than not choosing any host. We mitigate the risk this creates in three ways:

We list the same hosts whether or not they have an affiliate program available to us. A few of our covered providers don't offer affiliate commissions; their reviews look identical to those that do.
We rank for fit, not for commission. Our flagship guides specifically call out which use cases each pick is wrong for — information that costs us potential commissions but serves readers.
We disclose affiliate relationships at the top of every relevant page and in our full affiliate disclosure.