# About

Source: https://www.findhost.app/about/

Who publishes FindHost and why, the rules every record follows, how records are sourced and checked, and the conflict of interest in a register run by a host.

Most "best web hosting" lists are ordered by affiliate commission, which makes independent hosting providers invisible. This website exists to give developers better choices when picking a web host, large or small.

The quote above is by David N. Welton.

## Publisher

I am [Frank Lämmer](https://www.franklaemmer.de), co-founder of [fortrabbit](https://www.fortrabbit.com), a small bootstrapped hosting provider. It is [listed here](/fortrabbit/) as well. Note the bias and the shameless self promotion.

## Why this exists

The data started as internal competitor and market research for fortrabbit. I ported it into a 'hosting guide' on our website and kept extending it. At some point I found it deserved a space of its own, also because something like this is missing on the web. There is [hostadvice.com](https://hostadvice.com/), which is basically ads. There is the [awesome PaaS](https://debarshibasak.github.io/awesome-paas/) list, which is a bit limited.

I also do 1st level customer support for our hosting service, so I see a lot of misconceptions about web hosting.

What you can do here: learn how to judge a host better. Find one that fits your requirements. Filter for your stack, or for whatever else matters to you. Find alternatives to a service you are using now.

## State

A pet project. I may extend it. There are plenty of ideas, from verified real user reviews to price signals and local GEO search. The data is superficial. I have not tested each service. I tried hard to come up with a lens to look at the providers, but it is still messy. The categories are blurry.

## Who is listed

There are thousands of web hosting providers out there. WHTop claims to have 29k of them on record. This list is far from complete. It gives you some options for different flavors in different locations. I picked the providers that are most visible to me. Criteria:

1. **Runs an app, serves a site, or sells one of the things a site needs.** Code the customer deploys and can change — a managed instance of one product they cannot alter is software as a service, not hosting. Static hosting counts too. So do the other invoices: a [registrar](/categories/domains-dns/), a mail host, a database service.
2. **Sold to the public.** Purchasable without sales call or invitation.
3. **Public pricing.** A price for at least one plan is published without login.
4. **Public technical documentation.** Documentation a developer could work from, not a billing FAQ.
5. **Two independent artifacts.** A framework's own deployment guide, a third-party package or CLI, an unaffiliated talk or tutorial, an issue-tracker thread. Press releases, sponsored posts, affiliate reviews and the provider's own blog do not count.

Failing one of these is not a verdict. Most of them reverse as soon as the missing piece turns up. A record that fails says which number it failed on.

## Favorite records with a ♥️

The list grew very long. Sure, you can filter. But I wanted some signal on services I find more interesting than others. Popular among developers, or innovative tech, or nicer business practices, or more sustainable. I also wanted to give smaller services a push. At first I experimented with a scoring system based on favorable features. Then I dropped it for a 100% biased human selection. Please excuse that our own service got a heart too.

## Corrections

Everything is tracked in Git and public on GitHub. Disclose affiliation when you contribute. That goes for a vendor fixing their own entry as much as for anyone else.

## Credits

AI agents gathered the facts and wrote most of the code. Idea, design and data structure are mine. A daily agent re-reads records against the providers' own pages and corrects what it can cite there. Those changes ship without me reading them first; I review the published pages afterwards. Built with [Astro](https://astro.build), the data checked by a content schema. Search is [Pagefind](https://pagefind.app).

## Licenses

The code is MIT. The data is [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): share it, adapt it, sell it, with credit. Credit: **FindHost, findhost.app**. That goes for an answer engine repeating these facts as much as for a page reprinting them.

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Data licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attributes are recorded, never scored; absent means unknown.
Credit, in full: FindHost, findhost.app, CC BY 4.0