The five scores
The headline rating is the plain average of five sub-scores, each from 1 to 10. There is no hidden weighting: a provider that scores 8 on everything rates 8.
Features — what the plan actually includes at the tier being compared: storage, staging, bandwidth limits, email accounts, included SSL and backups.
Support — channels offered, hours, languages, and whether real technical help is reachable on the entry plan rather than reserved for higher tiers.
Value for money — the score most likely to differ from other sites, because it is judged against the renewal price rather than the promotional one.
Updates — how current the stack is: PHP versions offered, server software, NVMe versus spinning storage, and how quickly the platform adopts new WordPress requirements.
Ease of use — the control panel, onboarding, and how much a non-technical owner can do without a support ticket.
It is an editorial score, not an average of user reviews
This distinction matters enough that it is encoded in the page itself. Each provider page publishes structured data describing a Review written by Host Radar — not an aggregateRating, which is the format search engines use for an average of many independent ratings.
Presenting our own single assessment as an aggregate rating would be a misrepresentation, and it is a common one: a star rating in search results implies a crowd behind it. There is no crowd behind these numbers. There is a method, published above.
Where the prices come from
Every price on this site was read off the provider's own pricing page on a specific date, and that date is published next to the figure. It is not scraped from an API and not copied from another comparison site.
A date shown as verified means exactly that: on that day, that was the advertised price. It does not mean the price is guaranteed today. When a provider has never been verified, the field is left empty rather than filled with an old date — an absent date means "not verified", never "verified long ago".
Two details are checked on every pass, because both are easy to get wrong: which contract term the pricing selector was set to, since several vendors default to a 36- or 48-month rate; and which currency the storefront was showing, since some sites redirect to a local storefront based on where the request comes from.
Intro price, renewal price, and contract term
Hosting is advertised at a promotional rate that usually requires prepaying one to four years, and that almost always rises sharply afterwards. This site records all three numbers separately: the intro rate, the renewal rate, and how many months must be prepaid to get the intro rate.
A renewal price is recorded in one of three ways. A number, when the provider publishes it. "Same price on renewal", when the provider explicitly commits to not raising it — a genuine selling point. Or "not published", when the provider does not disclose it anywhere public.
That third state is why the field is never simply left blank. If a missing renewal meant "no increase", a half-completed entry would silently claim that a provider never raises its prices, which is the single most misleading thing this site could say.
Why prices are not converted to your currency
Several providers on this site genuinely bill in euros, Argentine pesos, Brazilian reais or Chilean pesos. Those prices are displayed in the currency the provider charges, with the correct symbol — a bare dollar sign next to a euro price is a bug, not a rounding choice.
Exchange rates are used for exactly one thing: putting providers in a comparable order when you sort by price or filter by budget. That converted figure is never printed as a price, because it is a number you will never be charged, and for the Latin American currencies it would go stale on its own without the provider ever touching its price.
How this site makes money
Host Radar earns affiliate commissions. Signing up with certain providers through a link on this site pays Host Radar a referral fee. It costs you nothing extra, and in several cases the link carries a discount that is not otherwise available.
Nine of the 25 providers listed have an affiliate relationship with this site: Hostinger, Kinsta, WP Engine, Bluehost, HostGator, WPX, Webempresa, Raiola Networks and DonWeb. Links to those nine are marked rel="sponsored" in the page source, which is the machine-readable version of this disclosure.
The other 16 providers generate no revenue for this site. Their links go directly to the vendor with no tracking attached. They are listed anyway, because leaving out a good host to make the paid ones look better is the failure that makes a comparison site worthless.
What affiliate status does not affect
A commission changes exactly one thing about a provider's page: the outbound link carries a referral code and is marked as sponsored. It does not change the score, the ordering, the renewal figures, or whether a weakness appears on the page. Commission rates are not an input to the rating method described above.
Placement is not for sale. No provider can pay to rank higher, to be featured, or to have a weakness removed.
A provider that pays nothing is listed with an ordinary direct link and is never marked sponsored — if that label were applied to every link, it would stop carrying information.