Alfie’s Guide
How we review web hosting
Pricing and specs are captured on a date. Speed and uptime numbers are labeled as synthetic measurements from our own probes and only shown after 60 days of data.
What we capture
Plans, term lengths, introductory and renewal prices, storage, visit limits, backups, staging, data center locations, money-back terms and the minimum term needed for a promotional price. Each fact is stored with its source URL and the date it was captured.
What we measure (planned setup)
Where a host page says Measured, the numbers come from our own monitors on a test site. The planned setup:
- Probe locations: US East, London, Singapore and Sydney.
- Check interval: every 5 minutes, recording DNS, connect, TLS and time to first byte.
- Test site: identical stock WordPress with one standard theme and the same content on every host. Where a host provides no caching we add a page-cache plugin, and the page notes what caching was on.
- Minimum data: 60 days of continuous monitoring before we quote a number.
- What counts as downtime: [TBC: exact downtime definition].
Limits of this data
These are synthetic lab measurements from our probes, not real-user data. A test site with no visitors has no Chrome field data. We do not present these numbers as how your site will perform.
Until monitors have run long enough, hosting reviews are labeled Researched and show prices and specifications only.