Affiliate disclosure

Comparison sites that earn commission on the thing they recommend have an obvious conflict of interest. Here is exactly how ours is contained.

Referral links are currently active on this site. The DigitalOcean links on our pages are DigitalOcean's own referral links. If you sign up through one and pay your first $25, DigitalOcean gives us $25 of account credit. It costs you nothing, and it is credit on a hosting account, not cash. Links to every other provider are plain links with nothing attached.

What commission cannot influence

• Which provider a page recommends. The server on every page is chosen by one rule: the cheapest plan, among providers whose prices we have read, that meets the computed memory and disk requirement. That rule is in the build script and it does not know what anyone pays us.
• The numbers. Every figure is computed from the published model and dated price sources. You can reproduce any of them by hand.
• The conclusion. A good number of pages here conclude that the paid product is cheaper and that you should not self-host. Those pages earn nothing. They stay as they are because a comparison that always reaches the same answer is not a comparison.

What commission does influence, honestly

Which providers we prioritised verifying prices for is not perfectly independent of which ones have a referral programme. We currently price DigitalOcean, and the hosting page names every provider we have not been able to price, including ones we expect to be cheaper. That gap is disclosed rather than quietly left out.

No paid placement

No provider, vendor or open-source project has paid to appear here, to be ranked, or to be described in a particular way. No one gets to review a page before it goes up.

Not advice

These are cost models, not recommendations about your business. Prices change, our snapshots go stale, and the vendor's own page is always the authority. Check before you spend.