For Hosting Providers

Register or Claim Your Page

Before registering, look for your company in the hosting directory: VoxelBench may already have created its page. Such a page carries UNCLAIMED, and you claim it instead of registering (see Claiming an Existing Page).

An account manages one provider only. To manage another one instead, write to us from the Contact page so that we release the provider you manage.

Registering a New Provider

Open Register your company, also reached by Register Your Company at the bottom of the directory. You must be signed in, and your account's email address must be verified. The form has six steps:

The site refuses the application if your account already has a provider, or if a provider with the same name or the same website domain exists. When that provider is unclaimed, the error offers Claim this provider. A network can register at most three providers an hour.

Once the application is accepted, the page exists but is pending verification: see Verification.

Claiming an Existing Page

On the page marked UNCLAIMED, click Claim this page. You need a verified email address, no other provider on your account, and no other claim open: an account can hold one claim at a time. The page must have a website address, because the check runs on its domain.

1. Start claim. The site generates a token, valid 72 hours. During that time, the page tells other visitors that a claim is in progress, and nobody else can claim it.
2. Publish a TXT record on the provider's domain, named _voxelbench-claim, with the value shown (it starts with voxelbench-claim=). Most DNS panels add the domain themselves: type only _voxelbench-claim as the name.
3. Verify now. When VoxelBench finds the record, it also checks that the TrustPilot page on file points to the same domain:
   • it does: the claim is approved at once, and your account becomes the page's owner, with a hosting provider account;
   • it does not: the claim is rejected and the page can be claimed again;
   • the page has no TrustPilot address, or the check could not run: an administrator decides, and you receive an email.

Cancel claim withdraws your claim at any time; the token stops working. A claimed page keeps the verification it already had.

Verification

Two separate checks follow a registration.

Verification by VoxelBench

An administrator reviews the application and verifies the provider. Your dashboard shows Pending Verification until then, with an Awaiting verification by our team banner, and Verified afterwards. Verifying your domain helps that review but does not replace it. Until the provider is verified:

• its page answers at its address, but does not appear in the directory;
• you cannot publish plans or request a certification;
• your account keeps the limits of its own plan.

Once it is verified, the page joins the directory with a blue check, and your account becomes a hosting provider account (see What the Account Includes).

VoxelBench can withdraw a verification, and does so automatically when TrustPilot reports the business as closed. The page then leaves the directory, you can no longer edit your plans, and your account stops being a hosting provider account, whoever withdrew the verification.

Your Domain and Review Pages

On Provider profile, the Domain Verification card gives a value starting with voxelbench-verify=. Add it as a TXT record on your website's domain, then click Verify Now. DNS changes can take a while to spread; Recheck DNS tries again. If the check keeps failing, Request Manual Validation asks an administrator, and Change Domain takes you to the website address, further down the page. Add to Cloudflare opens Cloudflare with the record filled in.

Once your domain is verified, VoxelBench checks that your TrustPilot, Google and HostAdvice pages point to the same domain, and marks each one that does as verified. Verify TrustPilot runs the TrustPilot check again; when the domains differ but the page is yours, use Request Manual Validation. Once your provider is verified, VoxelBench also retries the Google and HostAdvice checks once a day.

To point to another TrustPilot page, edit the TrustPilot page field of the profile editor, which Change TrustPilot URL also leads to when the check fails. Saving another page reloads its rating and removes the TrustPilot verification: run Verify TrustPilot again.

A verified domain:

• shows your provider under the Verified domain filter of the directory;
• shows Visit Website on your page and in the directory;
• is the domain your review pages are compared with.

Changing your website address, on the same page, resets your domain verification. While your domain or TrustPilot page is not verified, you may receive up to three reminder emails, a week apart.

Your Provider Dashboard

Once your account is linked to a provider, your dashboard has a Hosting provider group; Manage, on your public page, leads there too:

View Public Page opens your page as visitors see it.

Publishing Your Plans

On Offers, Add a plan, then choose Paid or Free:

• Required: a name; a CPU model or a CPU frequency, or both; for a paid plan, the monthly price and its currency (a three-letter code such as EUR or USD).
• Optional: RAM, vCPUs, storage and its type (NVMe, SSD, HDD), maximum players, and the address of the plan on your site.
• For a free plan: the server's lifetime (permanent or a number of days), whether it must be renewed and how often, whether it hibernates and after how long without players, and its limitations.

The form warns you about unusual values, such as a yearly price typed as a monthly one, without blocking you; values beyond realistic bounds are refused. A provider can hold 30 plans, archived plans included.

Import JSON creates or updates your catalogue in one go, from a file or pasted text. A plan is matched by its external_id, or else by its name, regardless of case. Preview changes shows what would change without saving anything; Apply saves. With Archive existing plans that aren't in this file, the plans the file does not contain are archived, never deleted. Download example gives the format.

The catalogue shows prices in euros, converted from your currency; your page shows them in the currency each visitor picks, with your own price on hover. Each plan on your page shows the date it was added or last updated. Public pages are cached: visitors may see a change only after several minutes.

How Benchmarks Reach Your Plans

You cannot link a benchmark to one of your plans yourself. A score reaches a plan in two ways:

• Certification: you request it, VoxelBench buys and benchmarks the plan, and you approve the result before it goes public. The plan then shows Certified (see Certification).
• VoxelBench's own measurements: VoxelBench may benchmark one of your plans itself (Measured by VoxelBench) or link an existing public benchmark to it (Associated). Only a benchmark whose report is already public can be linked: linking never changes who can see a report, nor how long someone else's report is kept. The score appears on your plan at once, without your approval, and you receive a notification under the bell that leads to the report.

The benchmarks you run yourself, auto-bench included, stay in your account: nothing attaches them to your plans on its own.

What each level proves to visitors is described in Levels of Proof.

Contesting a Proof

A Measured or Associated Score

On the report page of a benchmark linked to one of your plans, Contest this score appears for the account that owns the provider's page, as long as that link has never been contested. Explain why the score does not represent your plan (at least 10 characters), for example a measurement taken during an incident or on the wrong plan, then Submit contest.

The contest opens a second check by VoxelBench. The score stays on display meanwhile, and the API marks it as contested. If VoxelBench agrees with you, the benchmark is unlinked from your plan and its score disappears from your cards; otherwise it stays. Either way, you receive a notification under the bell, and that link cannot be contested again: only a new link opens a new contest.

The notification you receive when VoxelBench links a benchmark to your plan leads to its report. Otherwise, the catalogue does not link to these reports. To find one, GET /api/v1/offers?provider_id=<your provider's id> gives each plan's evidence.report_id, and GET /api/v1/reports/<that id> gives the short_id used in the address of the report page, /report/<short_id> (see API and Tokens). Your provider's id is the last part of your page's address. You can also write to us from the Contact page.

A Certification

A certification is contested from its review page, before you approve it (approving waives that right), within 14 days of its completion and only once: see Contesting a Certification.

Another Provider's Page

A wrong price, spec or score on another provider's page is reported with Report, on that page (see A Provider's Page).

Ratings and Rankings

Your customer ratings come from the TrustPilot page given at registration and, if you added them, your Google and HostAdvice pages. VoxelBench reads them once a day; you cannot edit them. How visitors see them is described in Customer Ratings.

Provider stats shows:

• Average score with the median, Best score with the number of certified benchmarks, Rank by avg and Rank by best;
• Score over the last 90 days, the daily average of your certified benchmarks;
• Action items: certifications expiring within 30 days, requests at the purchase, review or re-test stage, contestations awaiting a decision;
• Your rank over time, by average, by best score and by number of certified benchmarks;
• Provider leaderboard, the 20 first verified providers on each of these three measures;
• Side-by-side comparison with up to three competitors, added by their provider id.

The scores, series and ranks of this page count only your certifications in force: approved by you, not expired, and whose report has not been withdrawn. The ranks are computed once a day, among verified providers; a provider without a certification in force has no rank. A notification under the bell tells you when your rank rises or falls, when you overtake a neighbour or one overtakes you, and when a new verified provider appears.

What the Account Includes

A hosting provider account comes with verification; it is not something you buy. Its limits apply to the account that manages the provider:

• remote monitoring of up to 10 servers, with 30 days of history and 10 alert rules per server;
• 200 performance profiles and 200 memory reports, kept one year;
• 10 API tokens and 150 API calls a day;
• auto-bench with 5 targets, 30 runs per 24 hours, up to 20 runs per job and 10 Microsoft accounts.

The full tables are in Plans & Limits, API and Tokens and Auto-bench on the Website. When the provider's verification is withdrawn, by an administrator, a moderator or the daily TrustPilot check, the account returns to the limits of its own plan; it becomes a hosting provider account again when the provider is verified again.

Auto-bench for a Provider

A hosting provider account uses the same Auto-bench page as a Pro account, on its own linked and verified servers (see Auto-bench on the Website and, on the server side, Auto-bench). Only its quotas are specific to providers: its runs produce ordinary reports in your account, which are not attached to your plans and do not certify them. To put a score on a plan, request a certification.