About Hosting Notes

Who writes this

I'm Ron. I build and maintain production websites and small VPS servers — WordPress installs, Docker stacks, reverse proxies, and the backup routines that matter at 2am. Most of what is published here comes from setups I actually run, break, and fix again.

How recommendations are made

Every host recommended on this site is one I have paid for. No host has been given editorial approval over a page, and no host has seen a draft before publication.

The testing is deliberately unglamorous. I install a plain WordPress site, add no performance plugins beyond what the host ships, publish a few posts, and watch what happens to page weight, cache hit rate and admin responsiveness over weeks rather than minutes. Synthetic benchmarks are useful for comparing hardware; they say almost nothing about how a host feels when you are trying to publish a post on a Tuesday.

How this site makes money

Some links to hosting providers are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the provider pays a commission. You pay the same price you would pay going direct — affiliate discounts are not a thing that exists at this tier, whatever the landing pages imply.

What the commission does not buy: a place on this site. Two hosts I have used and would not recommend are still not recommended here, and one of them pays a higher commission than the host I do recommend.

What this site is not

It is not a benchmarking lab. I do not publish latency percentiles from a load generator, because those numbers describe a machine in a datacenter and not your site with your plugins. Where I quote a specification, it is the provider's published specification, dated.

It is also not a news site. When a price changes I update the affected pages rather than posting a new one, which is why you will see "Updated" dates that move.

Corrections

If something here is out of date or wrong, say so. Corrections are the cheapest form of quality control a site like this has, and they get made.