How we compare

Prices and specifications are read from each provider's own published pages. Each value is stored with the URL it came from, the passage it was read from and the date it was read. Pages show the date of the oldest figure they display, so a page cannot look more current than its stalest number.

Values expire. A price is treated as unverified after seven days and a specification after thirty. An expired figure is withheld and the page is queued for re-checking rather than shown with an old number.

• We do not test products. Nothing here reports hands-on experience, because we have none.
• We do not estimate a figure a provider has not published. A missing value is shown as "not published", never as zero or a guess.
• We do not publish review scores, star ratings or user testimonials, because we have not collected any.
• We do not reorder results by commission.

Each category has weighted criteria: for hosting, price, RAM, vCPU, storage and bandwidth. Every provider's figures are normalised against the others in the comparison, then combined using those weights. A provider that does not publish a figure scores nothing for it: declining to state a number is not an advantage over stating a poor one.

A further component reflects how much of a category's criteria a provider can actually evidence, so a well-documented product is not out-ranked by one we know little about. Every result on a comparison page can be expanded to show the exact contribution of each criterion.

Ties are broken by how many verified facts we hold, then alphabetically. Both are deterministic, so results do not reshuffle between updates.

Commercial performance is tracked, but it is used to decide which categories are worth researching further, not how products are ordered or described. The code that produces public rankings has no access to commission data at all; that separation is enforced in the software, not left to good intentions.

Where we have not joined a provider's affiliate programme, links point straight at the provider. We do not fabricate tracking links.

If a figure here is wrong, it is because the source page changed or was misread. Every value is traceable to the page and passage it came from, so corrections can be made against the evidence rather than by opinion.