Why my opinion on hosting is worth reading: I have spent the last six years keeping real production sites online, fast, and patched, today on Hostinger, Hetzner, Cloudways and AWS. The comparisons on this site are built from providers' own published prices and specs, checked and dated, with the hidden costs and renewal jumps spelled out.
What I actually do
I run AceFina Creative, a small studio that builds and maintains WordPress and web applications for clients, and I have freelanced on server work and WordPress development since 2019. Day to day that means I am the person who gets the call when a site is down, a database is melting, or a deploy went sideways. I have managed production infrastructure across Hetzner Cloud, Cloudways, Hostinger VPS and Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Contabo.
A few examples of the kind of work that shapes the recommendations here:
- Cut a struggling server from constant 3 GB memory spikes (98% capacity, sites offline) down to a stable 466 MB by tracing runaway MySQL and plugin processes. That experience is why I am opinionated about RAM sizing and why I distrust "unlimited" shared plans.
- Cleaned malware off 50+ WordPress sites and traced the common entry points. That is why every VPS guide here starts with hardening, not features.
- Debugged broker-grade latency and upstream routing for low-ping workloads, with traceroute and VPN comparisons. That is the background behind the Forex VPS latency guidance.
- Published Enhanced Autoload Manager on WordPress.org, a performance plugin now protecting over 1,000 sites, and built Visual Sentinel to catch the "server returns 200 OK but the page is visually broken" failures that uptime monitors miss.
Credentials at a glance
How I compare hosting
The comparisons here are desk research, not lab benchmarks. I read each provider's own pricing pages, documentation and status pages, line plans up by RAM, vCPU, storage and traffic, and show first-term and renewal prices side by side. I also audit the hidden costs: bandwidth overage, backup pricing, snapshot fees, and renewal pricing, because the headline price is rarely the real price. I do not publish benchmark or uptime numbers unless I can show how they were produced. You can read the method in any pillar, for example the cheap VPS comparison method.
How I make money (and why it does not bend the rankings)
HostingDiscounts.org earns affiliate commissions on Cloudways and Hostinger. Hetzner links are unpaid; its referral-credit program is discontinued. It earns nothing on DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, Contabo, Kinsta, Bluehost, Apex, or BisectHosting, and I recommend several of those when they are the right fit. I rank by use case, not commission size, and I disclose every relationship on the affiliate disclosure page. If a host I earn nothing from is the better answer for you, that is what the page will say.
Found something wrong?
Pricing and specs change. If a number on this site is out of date, email me at editor@hostingdiscounts.org and I will verify and fix it. Corrections from readers are how the site stays accurate between scheduled review passes.