Opinion is cheap. Our process isn't.

1. Buy like a customer

We use regular checkout flows and standard support channels. No special treatment, no cherry-picked demo accounts, and no advance notice to the provider that we're evaluating them.

2. Test the fundamentals

We monitor speed, uptime, dashboard usability, migration, backups, and support response quality over time rather than relying on a single snapshot.

3. Read the fine print

Renewal-price jumps, GST handling, refund exclusions, upsells, and resource limits get surfaced in the review — not buried in a footnote.

4. Listen for patterns

One angry review is a story. Repeated issues across many customers are a signal. We weigh community reviews accordingly, and every review is moderated before it goes live.

The trust score, and how to check it

Every host page shows the arithmetic behind its score rather than a set of ratings you would have to take on faith. Four lines, all of them checkable:

• Profile complete — how many of the five profile fields the host has filled in. A complete profile with no reviews scores 70, and it says so.
• Community rating — the average of every review we have approved, with the count beside it.
• Confidence — progress toward 20 reviews, the point at which customer feedback fully drives the score instead of the profile.
• Editor adjustment — shown as a signed change whenever we have set a score by hand after testing, so an adjustment is visible rather than folded into the total.

The page previously showed five dimensions — uptime, support, price honesty, ease of use, features. We removed them. We cannot buy and run every plan from every host, nothing in the score was computed from them, and the hosting companies set them for themselves through their own dashboard. A number nobody can check is not a methodology.

A host cannot change any part of this. Hosting companies write their own section of their page, clearly marked as theirs, and it goes through a TrustHost staff review before it is published. They cannot touch the score, the rating, or the ranking.

Tiers: what 1.1 and 3.3 mean

Every listing carries a tier from 3.3 up to 1.1. It is one ladder, and it reads downward: Tier 1 is the highest standing on this site, Tier 3 the newest. The sub-level counts down too, so a host climbs 3.3 → 3.2 → 3.1 → 2.3 → 2.2 → 2.1 → 1.3 → 1.2 → 1.1.

• Tier 1 — Highly trusted. A long record here, strong customer feedback, and a verified operating history.
• Tier 2 — Established. A real track record and consistent feedback, without the full history a Tier 1 placement asks for.
• Tier 3 — New or basic. Newly listed, lightly reviewed, or still filling in a profile. It is a starting point, not an accusation.

Every host starts at 3.3 and climbs. Nothing is granted on arrival, and each rung above the bottom is one earned step:

1. A complete profile.
2. A trust score of 80 or better.
3. Five approved reviews.
4. Twenty approved reviews — the point customer feedback fully drives the score.
5. A rating of 4.0 or better, averaged across at least five approved reviews.
6. Six months listed with us.
7. Eighteen months listed with us.
8. Three or more years operating, verified by us against company records.

Eight steps over nine rungs, so 1.1 is reachable and needs all of them. Two of those steps say listed with us rather than operating on purpose: we only witness a host from the day they appear here. A company can tell us when it actually started, and we will publish that as their claim — but it moves nothing until one of us has checked it against an incorporation record or domain registration.

Some things hold a host back. An upheld report against a provider caps them at 2.1 for a year; a second one drops them to 3.1. Repeatedly rejected page submissions cap them at 2.1. A host with a published blacklist case gets no tier at all — the case says everything a tier could, and more precisely.

An upheld report about a review — a fake, spam, or abusive one — is deliberately not part of any of this. Counting it would mean a host could climb by getting critical reviews taken down.

What an editor can and cannot do. We can move a host one sub-level up or down after hands-on testing, and when we do, the reason is published on their page next to the change. We cannot move a host into a different tier by hand — that half is earned from the steps above, or it is not earned at all.

A tier cannot be bought, and it buys nothing. Paying for a listing or featured placement never moves a host up the ladder, and a Tier 1.1 host has exactly the same tools, page, and ranking treatment as a 3.3 one. The tier changes no host's position anywhere on this site — it is there to be read, not to sell.

What a host says, and what we checked

Most of a host page is written by the hosting company. That is not a problem to hide — it is a problem to label. Everything a host says about itself on this site is either something we went and checked, or something marked as their own statement, and no part of the page renders the two the same way.

Features come from a fixed list. A host does not write its own feature copy; it ticks entries from a vocabulary we maintain — NVMe storage, India datacentre, DDoS protection, 24/7 support, an uptime SLA, and so on. That means the wording cannot mislead, only the claim can. A ticked box reads as “The host states” until one of us checks it against a written test — an AAAA record on a live customer host for IPv6, a ticket answered outside business hours for 24/7 support, a written SLA with a remedy rather than an uptime figure. Only then does it read “Verified by us”. A host cannot mark its own feature verified, and the directory's Verified only filter counts nothing else.

Every plan has to publish its renewal price. Renewal-price gouging is the single most common way hosting is sold misleadingly in India: a first year at ₹99 and a second at ₹499, disclosed nowhere a buyer looks. A plan on this site does not save without the second number. Where the renewal is more than 1.5× the intro price, we print the arithmetic in a plain sentence — “₹299 now, ₹599 when it renews — 2× after the first term” — rather than as an asterisk. Prices carry the date the host last confirmed them, and a figure nobody has confirmed in four months says so.

Every offer has to carry an end date. An offer with no end is not an offer, it is a price with a countdown drawn on it. Promotions on this site require a date they stop, and they stop showing the moment they do — there is no switch anyone can forget to flip. We keep the expired ones on file, which is what lets us notice the “limited time” sale that has been running all year.

The prose gets read by a person. What structure cannot fix — the pitch a host writes in their own words — is flagged for a moderator when it makes a claim nothing behind it supports: a ranking assertion when we are the ones who publish rankings, an uptime figure from a host with no SLA on file, urgency with no promotion behind it. Those flags are advisory. They never reject a submission and they are never a score; a moderator reads the reason and decides, and can disagree.

None of this moves a host anywhere. Features, plans and offers change no host's tier, trust score, or position on any page — exactly the rule the tier itself follows. They are information for a buyer to weigh, never a lever for a host to pull.

Where we are today

trusthost.org is in active development. Some scores and review counts on the site are illustrative while our verified testing pipeline is built out — this is disclosed on every host page. Read more in our editorial principles.