About

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

🍋 The web hosting market is a "lemon market" where sellers have more information than buyers.

The above is quote by David N. Welton.

Publisher

I am Frank Lämmer, co-founder of a small bootstrapped hosting provider, fortrabbit which is also featured here. Note the bias and the shameless self promotion.

Project motivation

The main data dates back to an internal competitor and hosting market research I did. It was ported and extended to a ‘hosting guide’ on our website. But I found it deserved its own space and something alike is missing on the web. There are websites like hostadvice.com which is basically ads. There is the awesome PaaS list, which is a bit limited.

I am doing 1st level customer support for our hosting service and I see a lot of misconceptions about web hosting.

Your benefits

Learn how to judge better. Discover a hosting service that really fits your requirements. Filter for your preferred stack or what else is important to you. Find alternatives to services that you are already using.

State

This is currently pet project. I may extend it. There are plenty of ideas, from verified real user reviews to price signal and local GEO search. The data is superficial. I haven’t tested each service. I tried hard to come up with a lens to look at the providers, but it is still very messy, as the categories are blurry.

Who is listed

There are thousands of web hosting providers out there, WHTop claims to have 29k hosting providers recorded. This webhost list here is far from being complete. It just 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, 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. Twelve months old. Purchasable for at least a year.
6. 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 criticism, and most rulings reverse the moment the missing evidence appears. A record that fails names the number it failed on.

Favorite records with a ♥️

The providers list grew very long. Sure, you can filter, but I wanted to provide some signal on services that I think are more interesting than others. They might be popular among developers, or I have innovative tech, or the company has more nice business practices or is more sustainable. At the same time I wanted to promote smaller services as well. Initially I experimented with a scoring system, based on favorable features, but I turned to a 100% biased human selection instead. Please excuse that I have featured our own service.

Corrections

Everything is tracked in Git and public on GitHub. Affiliation must be disclosed at the point of contribution, which applies to vendors correcting their own entry as much as to anyone else.

Credits

AI agents gathered facts and written most code. Idea, design, data structure, review is mine. Built with Astro, content schema. Search is Pagefind.

Licences

The code is MIT. The data is CC BY 4.0, share it, adapt it, sell it, with credit. Credit: FindHost, findhost.app. That applies to an answer engine repeating these facts as much as to a page reprinting.