How We Test: Every Number on This Site, and Where It Came From

I'm going to be blunt: the majority of hosting review websites on the internet have never purchased a single hosting plan. They rewrite the host's marketing page, add an affiliate link, and call it a "review." No tests. No data. No accountability.

I know this because I've read hundreds of competitor reviews while building ThatMy.com. I can tell in seconds which reviewers have never logged into a cPanel dashboard, never SSH'd into a server, never run a TTFB test. Their reviews say things like "blazing fast servers" and "excellent uptime" without a single number to back it up.

This page exists to show you, in uncomfortable detail, exactly what I do differently. Not because I think you'll enjoy reading about my testing methodology (you probably won't). But because I want you to understand why my recommendations look different from every other site.

Here's a quick example of why methodology matters:

The result? My rankings often disagree with the "consensus." Bluehost is #1 on most review sites. On ThatMy.com, it's on the avoid list. Because when you actually test it, the Starter plan answers in 287ms, drops 3,534 of 8,250 requests under a full load ramp, and renews from $3.99/mo to $9.99/mo. The data tells a very different story than the marketing.

Below is every step of my process, in order, with real examples from actual tests I've run.

Every host reviewed on ThatMy.com is purchased with my own credit card at retail pricing. I don't use vendor-provided "press accounts," free review accounts, or demo environments that could have boosted performance. The plan I test is the exact same plan you'd buy if you clicked "Sign Up" right now.

This matters more than you think. Multiple hosts have offered me free accounts for review purposes. I've turned down every single one. Here's why:

By purchasing at retail price through the normal checkout flow, I get the same experience you get. Same server assignment. Same resource allocation. Same support queue. If the checkout process has confusing upsells, I experience them. If the onboarding is slow, I experience that too.

What about the cost? Maintaining active hosting test accounts isn't cheap. I currently have active accounts on ScalaHosting, Cloudways, Kinsta, Hostinger, Contabo, ChemiCloud, and several others, costing roughly $200/month in hosting bills alone. These accounts exist solely for testing. I fund this through the affiliate commissions I earn when readers sign up through my links. It's a self-sustaining cycle: honest reviews → reader trust → affiliate revenue → more test accounts → more honest reviews.

Some hosts I've tested and subsequently closed the account (GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator). For these, I note the test date in my reviews and flag when data might be outdated. I'll reopen accounts and re-test if I have reason to believe the host has significantly changed their infrastructure, which happens more often than you'd think.

The single biggest flaw in most hosting benchmarks is uncontrolled variables. If you test Host A with a lightweight theme and Host B with a bloated page builder, the difference you measure is the theme, not the server. Your benchmark is useless.

Every host I test gets the exact same WordPress installation:

Why no CDN or caching plugins? Because I'm testing the server, not the caching layer. A CDN can mask a slow server by serving cached static files from edge nodes. That's great for production websites, but it tells you nothing about the underlying server performance. When you run WooCommerce, process forms, or access your admin dashboard, those requests bypass the CDN and hit the actual server. That's the speed that matters, and that's what I measure.

I do note what server-side caching the host provides by default (LiteSpeed Cache on LiteSpeed hosts, Varnish on some VPS platforms, OPcache settings) because this is part of the hosting product. But I never add external caching that you'd have to install yourself, because then I'd be testing the plugin, not the host.

Time To First Byte (TTFB) is the single most important hosting speed metric. It measures how quickly the server responds to a request, the time from your browser sending a request to receiving the first byte of the response. This includes DNS resolution, TCP connection, TLS handshake, and server processing time.

TTFB tells you how fast the server is, independent of your website's code, theme, or content. A 50ms TTFB means the server is fast. A 500ms TTFB means the server is slow. No amount of image optimization, minification, or lazy loading can fix a slow server, because TTFB happens before any content is even delivered.

How I test TTFB:

Why median instead of average? Because one slow response out of 50 can spike the average by 100ms. The median gives you the "typical" experience, what you'd feel when loading the site on a normal visit. I report both median and P95 (the 95th percentile, the speed at which 95% of requests are faster) so you can see both the normal case and the worst case.

Every number in that list is read from its record when this page is built, not typed into it. If a measurement changes, this page changes with it, and if a figure is ever removed from the records, this page fails to build rather than publishing a stale one. That is the point of the whole exercise, and it is the one thing on this page you can check without trusting me: the same figures appear on that host's own review, because both read the same file.

Look at that list. ScalaHosting at 23ms. GoDaddy at 369ms. Across all 94 origin measurements on file the spread runs from 21ms to 369ms, a 17.6x difference in server response time. Both are hosting the same WordPress install. Both are sold as "fast hosting."

This is why TTFB testing matters. Without it, you're relying on the host's marketing claim of "fast servers", which every host claims, including GoDaddy.

A server can look fast with one visitor. The real test is what happens under load, when hundreds of people request pages at the same time. This is where shared hosting plans fall apart and VPS plans prove their value.

I use Loader.io to drive the traffic. Each plan gets one run that ramps from zero to 250 clients over 60 seconds, and what the run reports is a distribution across the whole ramp: an average, a minimum and maximum, the 95th and 99th percentiles, the total request count and the number that failed. Four of the 100 plans ran a shorter 0-100 ramp and are labelled as such wherever they appear, because a shorter ramp is not comparable with a longer one.

Why this matters for you: If you're building a business website, you will eventually have traffic spikes. A blog post goes viral on Reddit. A product launch drives 500 visitors in an hour. A Black Friday sale. Your host needs to handle these spikes without crashing, throttling, or throwing errors. Load testing tells you whether it will.

Look at the right-hand column rather than the left. Bluehost, GoDaddy and HostGator did not merely slow down: between them they failed 3,534, 3,252 and 2,952 of the 8,250 requests each was sent. Better than a third of the traffic got an error rather than a page. These are the same hosts millions of people run business websites on.

ScalaHosting's VPS averaged 11ms across the same ramp with 0 failures, and its 99th percentile still came back in 44.02ms. That is what dedicated CPU cores buy: nobody else's traffic is competing for them. On shared hosting your site shares a processor with hundreds of other accounts, and when one of them spikes, everyone behind it waits.

Hosting companies love to say "powerful servers" and "high-performance infrastructure" without telling you what CPU you're actually running on. I find out. Here's how:

Where I have shell access (VPS and cloud): I run lscpu to get the exact model, then look it up on PassMark's CPU Benchmark database and record the score and the rank from that processor's own page. The rank is out of 5,999 CPUs, which is the size of PassMark's list. An older denominator is still printed on some pages of this site and is being corrected; where the two disagree, the figure above is the current one.

Where shell access is limited (most shared hosting): I take it from the control panel where one exposes it, then the host's own trust page, hardware spec page or server inventory, then a support ticket. Every row on this site records which of those it came from, because "verified over SSH" and "the vendor told me" are not the same standard and should not look the same. Some hosts will not answer at all, which is itself an answer.

What a PassMark score actually measures is worth two minutes if you have not met the metric before: it is a multi-threaded throughput figure, so it describes the chip rather than the slice of it you were sold.

Why CPU model matters: The difference between a 2016 Intel Xeon E5-2650 and a 2024 AMD EPYC 9474F is massive, 10x+ in single-thread performance. Hosting companies that use older CPUs can offer lower prices because the hardware is depreciated. But your WordPress site executes PHP on a single thread, so single-thread CPU performance directly determines your page generation speed.

ScalaHosting's AMD EPYC 9474F scores 102,255 and sits at #42. Rocket.net's Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2, a 2013 part, scores 12,150. That is an 8.4x gap between the best and worst processors I found, spanning a decade of hardware from 2013 to 2023. Both are sold as "hosting."

Rocket.net is the interesting one, and the reason a CPU rank is never the whole story: it sits at the bottom of that list and is still one of the fastest hosts on this site, because every request is answered from a Cloudflare Enterprise edge rather than from that processor. Hardware explains a lot. It does not explain everything, and a methodology that ranked purely on silicon would get that host badly wrong.

This is why I identify the CPU in every review, and why the number is published with the rank denominator and the date attached. You cannot compare hosting plans without knowing what hardware is underneath, and a $3/mo plan on a 2023 EPYC will beat a $10/mo plan on a recycled 2014 Xeon. The full table is on the CPU rankings page.

Speed doesn't matter if your site is down. I watch every host with external uptime monitors that check from more than one location, and every outage is logged with its start time, end time, duration and response code.

Why a longer record still matters: any host can have a good week. The patterns worth knowing, recurring outages, maintenance-window problems, degradation at peak hours, only emerge over months. That is the argument for monitoring continuously. It is not an argument for labelling eight weeks as twelve months, so the site now says which it has.

How I monitor:

What I've learned from uptime monitoring: Most reputable hosts deliver 99.95%+ uptime consistently. The real differences emerge in how they handle incidents, scheduled maintenance communication, incident response time, and transparency about root causes. ScalaHosting has been the most transparent: they publish incident reports and proactively notify clients. Some hosts (I won't name names... actually, yes I will, GoDaddy and Bluehost) don't acknowledge outages at all unless you open a support ticket first.

This is the step that most reviewers skip entirely, and it's the one that saves you the most money. The intro price is marketing. The renewal price is what you actually pay. And the Terms of Service is where the fine print hides the real resource limits, suspension policies, and billing traps.

For every host, I document:

Two things in that list are worth sitting with. The first is that ScalaHosting Mini is in the bad half. It goes $2.95/mo to $11.95/mo, +305%, on a 36 months term. This site recommends ScalaHosting and used to publish a renewal less than half that figure, which would have made it a 68% rise. It is not 68%. The vendor's own pricing page says otherwise, and a methodology page that hid its favourite host's renewal would be worth nothing.

The second is what separates the top of the list from the bottom, and it is not price tier. Rocket.net and Kinsta cost far more than the shared plans and charge the same on renewal as on day one, because neither ran an introductory rate to expire. SiteGround StartUp goes from $3.99/mo to $17.99/mo. The intro rate holds for 12 months, and year two then costs $215.88 against $47.88 for the whole of the first term. That is not a price increase, it is a different product at several times the cost, and the number was on the page you bought it from.

Why I read the full TOS: Because the marketing page says "unlimited" and the TOS page says "25% CPU, 200,000 inodes, 1GB RAM, 20 entry processes." The TOS is the legal document. The marketing page is an advertisement. I quote the TOS.

Speed tests and pricing analysis tell you what the product does. Complaint research tells you what happens when things go wrong, which they will, eventually, with every host. I want to know: When customers have problems, does the host fix them or fight them?

TrustPilot research method:

Reddit research method:

Why complaint research matters: A host with 100ms TTFB and great benchmarks can still ruin your business if their support is terrible, their billing is predatory, or they suspend accounts without warning. I've seen hosts with excellent technical performance but abysmal customer treatment. My reviews include both dimensions, because you deserve to know what happens when something breaks.

Ownership research: I also check who owns the hosting company. Private equity acquisitions are a reliable predictor of quality decline. When Newfold Digital acquired Bluehost and HostGator, support quality dropped and prices rose. When DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways, the same pattern began. I track ownership changes via Crunchbase, Wikipedia, and SEC filings because they affect your experience 12-24 months after the acquisition, long after the "everything stays the same" press release.

After completing all 8 steps for a host, I have a comprehensive profile: raw server speed, load resilience, CPU power, uptime reliability, true pricing, TOS fine print, and real user complaints. Now I rank.

My ranking factors, weighted by importance:

Why performance is weighted highest (30%): Because it's the one thing you can't fix yourself. You can add a CDN. You can optimize your images. You can install a caching plugin. But you can't make a slow server fast. Server performance is the foundation, everything else is built on top of it.

Why features are weighted lowest (5%): Because features are commoditized. Every host offers free SSL, one-click WordPress, and automated backups. These are table stakes in 2026, not differentiators. I won't rank a host higher because they include "free domain" when their server is 3x slower than the competition.

How I score a host: the plan I tested, not the company. One company sells very different machines under one name. In the same test round, hosting.com's Startup shared plan answered in 172ms and slowed to 640ms with 100 visitors at once; its Cloud VPS 8 GB answered in 79ms and needed only 155ms with the same 100 visitors. A single score for "hosting.com" would be wrong for one of them. So a score box names the plan it is for, and a review that tests several plans gives each one its own score. Reviews updated from September 2026 follow this; older ones are being brought in line.

The five parts of a score, each out of 10: speed (TTFB and the load test), value (what you pay for that speed on the term you would really buy), support (my own tickets and chats), ease of use (signup to a working WordPress site, timed) and renewal fairness (the renewal price against the first price). The overall score is the plain average of the five, so you can check the sum yourself.

Transparency isn't just about what I do, it's about what I refuse to do. Here are the practices you'll never find on this site:

My testing isn't a one-time event. Hosting companies change, they upgrade servers, raise prices, get acquired, change TOS policies, switch data centers. A review from 2023 can be dangerously outdated in 2026. Here's how I keep everything current:

Three test rounds a year, every four months: each round re-runs the TTFB and load tests, checks for CPU upgrades and downgrades, and re-reads current pricing. Three rounds a year leaves each round long enough to watch uptime over a real window instead of a few days. If a host changes significantly between rounds, I update the review within two weeks.

Uptime in every round: each round watches uptime over one fixed window, and every uptime figure on the site prints the window it covers.

Pricing surveillance: Hosting companies change prices without announcing it. I manually check pricing pages monthly and compare against my records. When I find a change, I update every page that references that host's pricing.

Ownership & industry tracking: I monitor hosting industry news for acquisitions, leadership changes, and infrastructure updates. When DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways, I re-evaluated and updated my Cloudways recommendation within a month, including projections about likely price increases that turned out to be accurate.

TrustPilot & Reddit monitoring: I check complaint ecosystems monthly for each major host. A sudden spike in 1-star reviews about a specific issue (e.g., "account suspended," "billing dispute") triggers an immediate review update.

I'm not hiding my methodology behind proprietary tools. Here's every tool I use, most are free. You could replicate my tests yourself if you wanted to.

None of these tools are proprietary or expensive. The "secret" to ThatMy.com's methodology isn't special software, it's the willingness to actually spend the time and money to do the testing. Most review sites don't test because testing takes months and costs thousands of dollars. Writing a fake review from the marketing page takes 30 minutes and costs nothing.

"Do you earn affiliate commissions?"

Yes. When you click an affiliate link on ThatMy.com and sign up for hosting, I earn a commission. This is disclosed on every page. Affiliate commissions are how I fund the $200+/month in test hosting accounts and the thousands of hours of research. But, and this is the critical difference, I recommend hosts based on test data, not commission rates. Bluehost pays me more per signup than ScalaHosting. I recommend ScalaHosting anyway. The data decides.

"How do I know your benchmarks are real?"

You don't, and you shouldn't trust anyone blindly. What I can tell you is how the numbers get onto the page. Every measurement lives in one record per plan, and every figure you read is pulled from that record when the page is built rather than typed into the sentence. That has three consequences you can check. A figure on a host's review and the same figure on a comparison page cannot disagree, because they are the same value read twice. A claim the records cannot support does not render as a guess, it stops the build. And a measurement that was never taken, such as a response time at one specific concurrency, cannot be published at all, which is why you will not find that column here. If you think a number is wrong, tell me and I will re-test and correct it publicly.

"Why don't you test more hosts?"

Money and time. Each host costs $50 to $200 to test, between the plan purchase and the monitoring that follows it. I currently hold measurements for 100 plans across 29 providers, and verified prices for 222 plans across 66. I prioritise hosts readers actually consider: the major shared hosts, the popular managed WordPress platforms, and the VPS providers that serve the most customers. If you want a specific host tested, tell me and I will add it to the list.

"Doesn't your recommendation of ScalaHosting make you biased?"

Fair question. Yes, I use ScalaHosting for ThatMy.com. Yes, I recommend them. Could I be subconsciously biased? Maybe. Here's my counter: I've switched my #1 recommendation three times in 10 years (SiteGround → Cloudways → ScalaHosting). Each time, I switched because the data told me to, not because of any financial relationship. I recommended SiteGround when they deserved it. I stopped when they didn't. I'll do the same with ScalaHosting if they ever stop earning the #1 spot. My track record shows I follow the data, even when it costs me affiliate revenue.

"Why do your rankings disagree with other review sites?"

Because other review sites don't test. They rank on commission rates, brand recognition and recycled opinions. When you actually buy the plans and run the benchmarks, the results look very different from the marketing. Bluehost ranks #1 on sites that earn $150 a signup without testing. On ThatMy.com, where I measured 287ms at the origin, 3,534 failed requests out of 8,250 under load, and a renewal from $3.99/mo to $9.99/mo, it is on the avoid list. The data decides.

"How often do you update your reviews?"

Every review is re-checked in each test round, three rounds a year, every four months. If a host changes pricing, upgrades hardware, or has a major incident, I update the relevant pages within two weeks. Every page shows its "Last Updated" date.

"Can hosting companies pay to improve their ranking?"

No. Not for any amount of money. I've been asked. I've declined. If that ever changes, ThatMy.com will be shut down the same day, because the site's entire value is built on honest rankings.