How the ranking is built

Top Picks is a comparison site, not a synthetic-benchmark lab. We do not claim to have measured every host’s TTFB from five continents, and we did not receive review units from vendors. The score is an editorial judgment from information anyone can check: advertised price, known renewal behavior, who the product is built for, and how long it takes a non-specialist to get a page on the internet.

That is a limitation. It is also more honest than a “9.8” produced by a spreadsheet nobody published. If you need packet-level performance data, look at independent uptime trackers and run your own stack. This ranking is for purchase decisions.

What weighs more

1. Time to a live site. Can someone with no sysadmin background buy a plan, attach a domain, turn on SSL, and publish this week.
2. Price honesty. Is the advertised number close to what they will pay in month 13, or is the homepage a 48-month teaser.
3. A path to grow. When the brochure site becomes a shop, or the shop becomes an app, can they scale without a panicked weekend migration.

Those three filters are why Hostinger is first for most people and Hetzner is first for anyone who already knows SSH. One list cannot maximize both audiences. That is why every row has a badge: the score is relative to that job, not a universal quality medal.

What we do not score (yet)

Support wait times, exact uptime, and raw CPU benchmarks are not in the number. Those change by plan, region, and week. Where a limitation is well known — renewal jumps, missing one-click WordPress, expensive bandwidth — it shows up in the review as a con, not as a fake precision score.

Money

Some links are affiliate links. Order is not set by commission alone, but we do have an incentive for clicks. If that conflict matters to you, read the disclosure before you use the buttons.

Prices on this site were checked against public marketing pages in September 2026. Checkout can disagree. Treat our numbers as a starting point, not an invoice.