What this site is, and how it pays for itself
Host Cliff compares web hosts on the price you pay in year two, not the price on the banner. Everything below is checkable against the pages themselves — that is the point of writing it down.
How this site makes money
Affiliate commission. If you buy hosting through a link here, the host pays us a share — usually a fixed amount per sale, occasionally a percentage. You pay the same price either way.
What that money does not buy: a position in a ranking. No host has ever paid to be placed, and there is nowhere in the admin to do it — the order of a list comes from the scores, and the scores come from the published rubric. Several hosts we rank pay us nothing at all, because they run no affiliate programme. They are ranked anyway, and linked to directly.
The disclosure bar at the top of every page says the same thing, and it is not dismissible.
Two kinds of host, kept separate
Most comparison sites present every host as though it has been assessed. We track more hosts than we have actually reviewed, so the two are labelled differently and the difference is enforced in the database rather than in the copy:
- Reviewed 16
- Scored against all five criteria, with a verdict, a price history and a renewal figure we can cite. Only these appear in rankings, comparisons and the finder.
- Listed 89
- Facts only — price, renewal, headquarters, control panel — each with a source and a date. Marked not yet reviewed, and excluded from every ranking and from any aggregate rating. A listed host is one we have not earned an opinion about.
Why the prices carry dates
A hosting price without a date is a rumour. Every figure on this site is published with the day it was last checked and the page it came from.
A nightly job re-reads each host's pricing page and confirms the figure we print is still on it. When it is, the date moves forward automatically. When it is not, the host is flagged and a person looks at it — nothing here is ever rewritten by a script. Three limits worth stating: some hosts block automated requests and are only ever checked by hand; renewal rates are often absent from pricing pages, so the job is never allowed to guess one; and a host that bills in another currency is shown with the exchange rate and the date it was taken, rather than converted silently.
Things this site does not do
- No paid placement. Ranking position is not for sale.
- No invented reviews. Reader reviews are submitted by visitors and moderated by hand. We write none of them.
- No analytics or ad trackers. None. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, no pixel — see privacy.
- No uptime claims we did not measure. Where a number comes from a provider's own SLA rather than our testing, it says so.
- No scores blended from other people's ratings. Third-party ratings are shown separately, never folded into ours.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, it is worth more to us to fix it than to defend it. Send the page and what you believe the correct number is, and we will check it against the provider and correct it — renewal prices especially, because they move quietly and they are the reason this site exists.
Getting in touch
E-Cybertech Solution publishes this site. Questions, corrections and press enquiries all go to the same place, and a person reads them: the contact page.
Written down so it can be held against us. If the site stops matching this page, the page is wrong — tell us.