Where the data comes from
Every price, plan and data-center location was read from the provider's own pricing pages, documentation and location lists, most recently checked on October 23, 2026; Trustpilot scores were read at the same time. Each provider page lists its source URLs. We record the regular monthly price, not the introductory one, and note first-term discounts, annual-only deals and excluded items (IPv4, storage, VAT) in the plan notes.
We currently track 160 providers, 1618 plans (1605 with a published price) and 1441 data-center locations in 255 cities and 85 countries. The full dataset is on the open data page.
Which providers and pages we include
We list providers that people actually search for by name (monthly search volume above zero in the United States, measured with Ahrefs). Rankings exist for the countries, cities, use cases, features and comparisons that people search for, and every ranking shows the date it was last updated.
How providers are scored
Each provider receives a composite score out of 100 built from six parts:
- Entry price (30 points): the cheapest plan that meets the page's requirements, ranked against the other providers on that page.
- Value (15 points): the median price per gigabyte of RAM across all published plans.
- Network (15 points): the number of data-center locations.
- Features (20 points): NVMe storage, DDoS protection, snapshots, backups, API, IPv6, hourly billing, custom ISO, dedicated-CPU plans, private networking and Windows images.
- Reputation (15 points): the Trustpilot score weighted by the number of reviews, so a 4.9 from twelve reviews counts less than a 4.3 from twelve thousand.
- Transparency (5 points): whether prices, an uptime SLA and a refund policy are published.
Use-case pages first filter on the workload's official requirements (for example 2 GB of RAM and Windows Server for MetaTrader) and pick each provider's cheapest plan that meets them; trading pages add points for data centers close to the Equinix LD4, NY4 and TY3 hubs. Pages titled "cheap" or "cheapest" are sorted by price alone.
Editorial choices
Scores decide the order of the tables; the short list at the top of each page is editorial and may place a provider above its score where we judge it a better fit for that page's readers. The data shown for every provider is the same regardless of position.
What the data does not capture
Benchmarks: we do not run performance tests, so two "2 vCPU" plans may differ a lot in real throughput. Support quality beyond review scores. Prices in currencies other than USD are converted at the rate noted on the provider page and will drift.
Updates and corrections
Rankings are rebuilt whenever prices change, and every page shows its update date. If you work for a provider and see an error, send the correct figure and a public source to [email protected].