What we're trying to do
Help a UK-based buyer pick the right WordPress host in under five minutes, without us pretending we don't earn affiliate commissions and without those commissions actually skewing the rankings.
Five scoring dimensions
Each host is scored on a 0-5 scale across:
- Customer support. Channels available (phone, chat, ticket), staffing hours, scope (server-only vs WordPress-level vs plugin-level), and quality of resolution in our test contacts.
- Support response time. Time-to-first-response and time-to-resolution. We log this from real support tickets we file on each host.
- Value for money. Renewal price (not intro price) divided by the feature set you actually get at renewal.
- Server speed. TTFB and Core Web Vitals on a stock WordPress install with the host's recommended cache stack, measured from a UK ISP.
- Network uptime. Public status pages, third-party monitoring data and our own monitoring over the previous 12 months.
What we don't score
- Intro pricing. Intro discounts are a marketing instrument, not a real cost. We compare renewal pricing.
- Marketing claims. "Unlimited storage" usually means fair-use storage. We document the fair-use limit where one applies.
- TrustPilot scores in isolation. We use TrustPilot as a sanity check, not a primary signal. A host with a 4.9 TrustPilot that drops the ball on UK support hours still loses points.
What we do about affiliate commissions
We earn a commission when a reader signs up with a host through one of our outbound links. The commission amount varies by host. The amount has no influence on rank order. Where you see our top pick at the top of a page, it's because it earned that placement on the editorial criteria above, not because it pays the best commission. (HostPresto, our current top pick, is one of the lower-commission programmes we run.)
How often we update
We re-score the hosts at least every six months, and immediately whenever one of them makes a material change to pricing, plan structure or support policy.
How to challenge our scoring
If you run one of the hosts we cover and disagree with a score, we want to hear from you. Email [email protected] with the specific score you're challenging and the evidence. We'll review and either update or explain why we're holding the line.