How We Present Hosting Providers

No Paid Placement

No provider can pay to appear in the directory or the offers catalogue, to be featured, or to move up a list. The site has no "sponsored" slot. Every order described below is computed from public figures, by rules that apply to every provider alike.

What Decides an Order

Each page answers a different question, so each has its own default order:

• The Hosting Providers directory sorts by the median score of a provider's certified benchmarks, once it has at least 3. A single lucky benchmark, or a provider's most expensive plan, no longer decides on its own. Providers with fewer than 3 come after, without being penalised. The best score, the average, the benchmark count and the customer ratings remain available as sorts.
• The Offers catalogue sorts by price by default, or by the sort you pick. A certified offer stands out with a badge and a highlighted card.
• The comparator (describe your server in a sentence on the Offers page) ranks plans on RAM, budget, measured performance, player capacity and region. How much the measured performance counts depends on its proof: a certification counts in full, a VoxelBench measurement 70 %, a linked benchmark 35 %. Its short list takes the best plan of each provider before a second plan from the same one.

Equal Is Equal

When two providers or two offers are tied on what a list is sorted by, the order between them changes every day. It is drawn from the date and each one's identifier: the same all day long, so paging through a list never shows one twice nor skips one, and different the next day. Alphabetical order, sign-up date or an internal identifier never decide on their own: they always placed the same provider first.

A Measurement Is a Series

A measured offer is not proven by its best benchmark, but by its series: its most recent public standard reports (at most 10, over the last 180 days, on scoring versions comparable with the current one). The score shown is their median, and the number of reports is shown next to it. The median is the score of a real report, which you can open: never an average that no run produced.

A series of one or two reports is shown as such: read it as a single measurement.

What a Provider Can Pay For

Certification is a paid VoxelBench service: benchmark runs scheduled on the provider's real plan, under VoxelBench's control, and published only once the provider approves them. It buys a priority, and this page says so:

• a certified offer carries a badge and a highlighted card;
• in the comparator, its score counts in full, ahead of a measurement or a link;
• the directory's benchmark figures come from certified reports.

Certification does not buy a result. The score is what the runs measured, a certification expires, and any reader can see the report behind it.

Measured by VoxelBench

"Measured by VoxelBench" means VoxelBench ran the benchmark itself, on a server running on that plan, and stands behind the figure. A provider can contest a measurement from its report. While the contest is open, the API and the AI connectors flag the evidence as contested, so that it is not quoted as settled.

VoxelBench does not measure every provider. An offer without a measurement is not a worse offer: it has simply not been measured.

Referral Links

A "Visit website" button may go through a provider's referral link. It is then marked "referral link". A referral link changes no order on the site.

Customer Ratings

TrustPilot, Google and HostAdvice ratings come from those services, as they publish them. They are available as sorts, never mixed into a benchmark score.