Comparing Hosting Providers — Hosting Providers

Two Pages, Two Questions

Which provider? The Hosting Providers directory has one card per provider, with its certified benchmark figures, its customer ratings and the countries of its data centers. Each card leads to the provider's page.
Which plan? The Offers catalogue has one card per plan, from every provider, with its price, its specs and the best benchmark score linked to it. Up to four plans can be set side by side.

Both are open to everyone, without an account.

The Hosting Directory

The directory lists every provider that VoxelBench has verified, certified or not; they carry a blue check. A provider that has registered but is not verified yet does not appear in it. Two badges can follow the name:

FREE: the provider has at least one free plan on sale.
UNCLAIMED: VoxelBench created this page and the provider has not claimed it yet. Its information and its plans were entered by VoxelBench, not by the provider.

On a card	What it means
#1, #2…	The card's position in the order you chose, after your filters
SS to F, under the position	The rank of the provider's best certified score, on the same scale as the ranks of report pages (see Rankings)
Best	The provider's best certified benchmark score
Avg	The average of its certified benchmark scores
Certified	How many certified benchmarks it has
Stars (TrustPilot, Google, HostAdvice)	The rating on that platform, out of 5, with the number of reviews (see Customer Ratings)
Country codes	The countries where the provider says it has data centers

Best, Avg and Certified count only the certifications in force: approved by the provider, not expired, and whose report has not been withdrawn. A benchmark measured by VoxelBench or associated with a plan does not enter them (see Levels of Proof). A provider with no certification in force shows a dash for Best and Avg, and no rank.

Above the list:

the search box looks for a provider's name;
under Filter, each pill you turn on keeps only the matching providers: Verified domain (the provider proved it controls its website's domain), Certified benchmarks, Free plan available, TrustPilot reviews, Google reviews, HostAdvice reviews and Unclaimed; Data center locations keeps the providers present in the countries you tick;
the sort menu orders by Best score (the default), Average score, Certified count, TrustPilot rating, Google rating, HostAdvice rating or Name (A–Z); providers without the value come last;
Grid view and Table view show the same providers; Show map displays their countries, and a click on a country filters the list.

The page remembers your view, sort and filters in this browser.

Visit Website opens the provider's site. When VoxelBench has a referral link for this provider, the button uses it.

A Provider's Page

A provider's page gathers, from top to bottom:

Certified Benchmarks, Best Score, Average Score and Median Score, computed from its certifications in force, like the directory's figures;
Customer Reviews: each platform's rating and review count, with the badges described in Customer Ratings;
Additional services: the services the provider says it offers;
Plans, free and paid. Prices are shown in the currency you pick; an asterisk marks a converted price, and hovering it shows the provider's own price. A plan can carry FREE, Archived (no longer sold, kept for the record), Measured by VoxelBench or Associated with its score. A free plan lists its lifetime, renewal, hibernation and limitations. See on hoster site opens the plan on the provider's site, and each plan shows the date it was added or last updated;
Active Certifications: each certified plan with its score, its rank, its date, how long it stays valid and the IP address of the tested server; View certification details opens the certification's page (see Certification);
Certified Benchmarks: the reports of its certifications in force, with their rank, score, CPU, RAM and date. An expired certification leaves this list and Active Certifications, although its report stays certified.

Signed in, you can Report the provider, or some of its plans, to the moderators: fake provider, inaccurate plan or spec mismatch, wrong or outdated price, score not representative of real performance, and other reasons.

The Offers Catalogue

The Offers page, titled Find an offer, lists the plans of every provider that are on sale and visible.

A card shows:

the provider's name, with a shield if VoxelBench verified it, and one customer rating;
the plan's name and its badges: Certified, or else Measured by VoxelBench or Associated, and FREE;
the monthly price in euros, converted from the plan's own currency (a free plan shows Free);
the specs the provider announces: RAM, vCPUs, CPU frequency, storage and its type, maximum players, CPU model;
the proof: Best certified score followed by pts / €, or Measured by VoxelBench or Associated score with the score;
the provider's data-center countries, View provider, a link to the plan on the provider's site, and + to add the plan to a comparison.

The search box looks for a plan's or a provider's name. The page accepts up to 60 searches a minute from one address; beyond that, it shows Too many searches in a short time, and a failed search shows The search failed: neither message means that no plan matches. The sort menu offers Price (low to high) (the default), Price (high to low), RAM (most first), CPU frequency (fastest), Perf / € (certified only) and Newest (the plans most recently added to the catalogue).

The filters cover Type (Paid, Free), Price / month (€), RAM (GB), vCPUs, CPU freq (GHz), Storage (GB), Storage type (NVMe, SSD, HDD), Country, Provider and Services, plus Certified only and Verified providers. Next to each range, the page shows the lowest and highest value in the whole catalogue. Reset clears everything, and the page's address keeps your filters, so a search can be shared.

Four things to know:

A free plan has no price: a price filter leaves it out. To see free plans, tick Free under Type.
Country and Services describe the provider, not the plan: a plan may be sold in only some of the provider's countries.
Perf / € is the plan's best certified score divided by its monthly price in euros. Only a paid plan with a certification in force has one; sorting by it puts the other plans last.
A sort never puts empty values first: a plan without the sorted value (RAM, CPU frequency) comes last. When sorting by price, a free plan counts as zero, so it comes first from the lowest price and after every paid plan from the highest; a plan whose price cannot be converted into euros comes last either way.

Comparing Offers Side by Side

Click + on up to four cards, then Compare at the bottom of the page. Compare offers puts the plans in columns: Price / month, Best certified score (or Not certified), Perf / €, RAM, vCPUs, CPU model, CPU frequency, Storage, Max players, Locations, Provider verified, Provider rating (every platform, with its review count) and Certified. The selection is kept in this browser and in the page's address, so it can be shared; Clear all empties it.

The comparison table shows certified scores only: to see a measured or associated score, open the provider's page.

Describe What You Need

When it is available, a box at the top of the catalogue, Describe what you need, ranks up to five plans from a sentence such as "80 players, 20 plugins, 15 euros a month, servers in France". Click Rank offers. A language model turns your sentence into criteria, but the ranking itself is computed from the catalogue's figures: the RAM against an estimate of what your server needs, the budget (a plan more than 10 % over it is left out), the level of proof, the number of players and the region. A certified plan counts more than a measured one, a measured one more than an associated one, and a plan without any benchmark gets nothing for performance. Performance is judged on the real scale of VoxelBench scores, not out of 100.

Each result shows its level of proof, Certified, Measured by VoxelBench, Linked benchmark or Not benchmarked, with its score in points, and a short justification written in the page's language, which places the score against the median score (250,000 points) rather than against a maximum. The recommended RAM shown is an estimate, not a measurement.

Levels of Proof

A plan's score comes with a level of proof, from the strongest to the weakest:

Level	Badge	Where the benchmark comes from	What it proves
Certified	Certified	VoxelBench bought the plan like a customer and benchmarked it three times; the provider reviewed the evidence and approved it	The plan as sold on that date: the median of three runs, with purchase evidence (see Certification)
Measured	Measured by VoxelBench	VoxelBench ran the benchmark itself and linked its public report to the plan	A measurement VoxelBench stands behind, without purchase evidence or approval by the provider
Associated	Associated	A public benchmark that VoxelBench linked to the plan	Only the link: nobody vouches that the benchmark ran on this plan
None	—	—	Nothing measured: the specs and the price are what the provider announces

The rules behind the badges:

A certification counts only once the provider has approved it, and until it expires. Before its approval, nothing of it is public, not even in a figure.
VoxelBench can link a benchmark to a plan only if its report is already public: linking never changes who can see a report, nor how long someone else's report is kept. The score appears on the plan at once, without waiting for the provider's approval, and the provider is notified. It counts only while its report stays public, and only a standard benchmark counts: a stress-limit score is on another scale.
The strongest level wins. A certified plan shows Certified and its best certified score; the Measured by VoxelBench and Associated badges appear only on plans without a certification in force.
Between measured and associated benchmarks, the level also comes first: a measurement takes precedence over an associated benchmark, even with a lower score. The highest score only decides between benchmarks of the same level.

Contested Proof

The provider that owns a page can contest a measured or associated score linked to its plans, once per link. The score stays on display while VoxelBench examines the contest. If VoxelBench agrees with the provider, the benchmark is unlinked from the plan and its score disappears from the plan's cards; otherwise it stays, and the same link cannot be contested again. The catalogue's pages do not mark a contest in progress; the API does (see For Scripts and Agents).

A provider can contest a certification only before approving it, and a contested certification is not public (see Contesting a Certification).

Customer Ratings

The ratings come from TrustPilot, Google and HostAdvice, not from VoxelBench. They are shown out of 5 (HostAdvice's ratings out of 10 are converted), with the number of reviews, and refreshed once a day.

Verified next to a rating, on the provider's page, means that the platform page points to the domain the provider proved it controls, or that VoxelBench checked it by hand. A rating without this check is marked unverified, on the provider's page as in the directory: nothing proves that the platform page belongs to this provider.
Verified by TrustPilot means that TrustPilot itself verified the business; Claimed by owner, that the business manages its TrustPilot page. The provider's page also shows TrustPilot's breakdown by stars and how fast the business answers negative reviews.
The offers catalogue shows one rating per provider, TrustPilot's first, then Google's, then HostAdvice's, without saying whether it is verified. The comparison table lists them all.

When TrustPilot reports a business as closed, VoxelBench withdraws the provider's verification, and the provider leaves the directory until VoxelBench has looked into it.

Rankings

The number on each card of the directory (#1, #2…) is only its position in the order you chose. Each order answers a different question:

Best score puts first the provider with the best single certified benchmark, even if it has only one;
Average score reflects the overall level of its certified plans;
Certified count shows how much evidence a provider has gathered.

All three read only certifications in force.

A benchmark's rank, from SS to F, is on its report page: it places the score among recent reports, and can change over time while the score stays the same (see Rank Badges). The letter on a directory card is the rank that the provider's best certified score gets on that same scale today.

Reading a Gap Between Two Offers

Compare the same level of proof. A certified score is the median of three runs on a plan VoxelBench paid for. A measured or associated score is the best benchmark of the strongest level linked to the plan: the more benchmarks a plan has, the better its chance of showing a high one.
Look at the spread. A certification's page lists its three runs. A gap between two plans smaller than the spread between the runs of one plan says little.
Open the reports. Two scores compare well only when the Minecraft version, the server software and the Java settings match (see Benchmark Methodology). The sub-scores, single-core, gameplay and hardware, tell you where a gap comes from (see How Scoring Works).
Check the dates. A benchmark describes a server on the day it ran. A certification states its date and stays valid one year.
Read Perf / € with the score. A cheap plan can lead on points per euro with a modest score: first check that the score is enough for your server.
Remember that specs are announced. Two plans with the same RAM and CPU figures are not the same machine: only a benchmark tells them apart.

What the Comparison Does Not Tell You

Everything a benchmark does not measure. A benchmark measures the server itself: it says nothing about network latency to your players, uptime, support or backups.
Whether the specs are exact. Prices, specs, services and countries are entered by the provider, or by VoxelBench on an unclaimed page. Only a certification checks the specs against the machine, and it is completed only when they match; the detail of that check stays between VoxelBench and the provider.
Other locations and later dates. A certification tests one plan in one location, on one date; the public page does not say which country was tested. Changing a plan's listing afterwards does not change its certification. On shared machines, performance also depends on the other customers.
Every provider and every plan. The directory lists only the providers VoxelBench has verified, and the catalogue only the plans that have been entered.

For Scripts and Agents

The same catalogue is available through the API: GET /api/v1/offers returns the plans on sale, each with an evidence object: its tier (certified, measured, linked for associated, or none), its score, the report_id of the benchmark, contested when a contest is open, and certification_expires_at for a certification. evidence=certified, measured or any keeps only the plans with at least that level. The endpoint answers without a token; with one, it needs the offers:read scope (see API and Tokens).