What WebFin Does
WebFin reviews web hosting providers with one question in front of every other: what does this actually cost to own?
Hosting is sold on the first-year price. The renewal is where the money is. A plan advertised at $2.99 a month can renew at $17.99 — the same product, six times the price, and the number is rarely on the page you bought from. We publish the renewal alongside the promo, every time, with the term length attached, because a multiplier calculated over 12 months and one calculated over 48 are not the same claim.
We also name the owner. Newfold Digital operates more than sixty brands on shared infrastructure, including Bluehost and HostGator. Most readers comparing those two do not know they are comparing two brands of one company. Every review here carries a “Who Owns It” section for that reason.
How We Research
Every figure on this site is sourced to a named source with a date. Prices come from the provider’s own pricing page, terms come from the hosting agreement, ownership comes from company filings and press releases. Where sources disagree, we say so and show both rather than picking the more convenient one.
We do not run our own speed or uptime tests. We are a small team without a testing lab, and a single site on a single plan measured from a single location would tell you nothing reliable. Publishing numbers like that would look authoritative and mean very little. When we cite performance data, it comes from third parties, and we name them, date them, and describe how they measured — including when the measurement was run by the provider itself.
How We Rate
Five criteria, weighted equally. The final score is the arithmetic mean of the five.
Speed — third-party TTFB and load-time measurements, with the source, date, and methodology named. Vendor-published numbers are labelled as such.
Uptime — independent monitoring data and the provider’s own SLA terms, including what the guarantee actually covers and what counts as downtime under it.
Support — documented response times from published tests, channels offered, and hours of coverage.
Price & Renewal — total cost of ownership across 36 months: promotional term, renewal rate, and the add-ons that are not optional in practice. This is the criterion we weight most carefully in our written analysis, even though it carries the same numerical weight as the rest.
Ease of Use — control panel, migration process, and installation.
How the top five is chosen
Our top five is based on market share, catalogue breadth, and reader search demand — not on score. It answers “which providers are people actually choosing between,” not “which are best.”
This means a provider outside the top five can score higher than one inside it. That is not an error. A niche host serving a thousand customers well may earn a better score than a mass-market brand serving millions adequately, and both facts are useful to you.
How We Make Money
Affiliate links. If you buy hosting after clicking through from this site, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Commissions in this industry vary enormously. Some providers pay a flat $65 per sale. Others pay up to $500, or a recurring percentage of what you keep paying for as long as you stay. That gap creates an obvious incentive to steer readers toward the expensive programs, and readers in this niche know it — the problem is discussed openly in hosting communities.
So we will state the rule plainly: we do not rank by commission size. Scores are set by the five criteria above, applied the same way to every provider, including the ones that pay us nothing and the ones that would pay us the most.
You do not have to take that on trust. The criteria are published above; the sources are named in every article. If a score does not follow from the evidence we have shown you, that is a failure you can point to.
What We Disclose About Ourselves
This site runs on Hostinger. Hostinger is one of the providers we review. We pay for the plan ourselves, we bought it before this site existed, and we have received no discount, free hosting, or other consideration from them. It does not change how they are scored, but you should know it while reading that particular review — and it is stated at the top of that review as well.
This site uses Yoast SEO. Yoast was acquired by Newfold Digital in August 2021 — the same company that owns Bluehost and HostGator, both of which we review. We use the plugin because it is good at its job, and we mention it because we would flag exactly this kind of relationship if we found it anywhere else.
We are not affiliated with any other organisation named Webfin. The name is shared with several unrelated businesses in finance, software, and education, in several countries. We have no connection to any of them.
What We Don’t Do
- We don’t run our own speed or uptime tests, and we don’t present third-party numbers as if we had
- We don’t rank providers by how much they pay us
- We don’t publish “who was fastest this week” tables
- We don’t buy backlinks
- We don’t run display advertising
- We don’t call any provider “the only one” that does something — the claim ages badly and is almost never true
Corrections
Prices change, plans get renamed, and companies get bought. We re-verify every price and ownership claim on this site quarterly, and we correct errors when we find them or when you tell us.
If something here is wrong, contact us and tell us what and where. We would rather fix it than defend it.
Last reviewed: 18.08.2026