How the rating works
Out in the open — unlike most hosting catalogues, which publish no method at all.
Five criteria
Every approved review scores five separate aspects of a provider, not one overall mark:
- Value for money
- Speed
- Reliability
- Support
- Ease of use
The ordinary provider rating
The score on a provider page and in the catalogue is a plain average of every approved review over the whole period. It does not reset each month and reflects the provider's general reputation.
Top of the month and host of the year
Top rated is a separate calculation for one particular period — a month or a year — rather than for all time. You can vote for a plan or review a provider once a month, so the top reflects current opinion, not votes cast years ago.
The trouble with a plain average is that a provider with two reviews at 5.0 formally beats one with three hundred reviews at 4.8 — which is plainly wrong. So for the top of the month and of the year we use a Bayesian weighted average, the same method IMDb uses for film ratings.
The formula
- R
- this provider's average score for the criterion over the period
- v
- how many reviews it has in that period
- C
- the average score for the criterion across ALL providers in the same period
- m
- the confidence threshold (currently 10) — the fewer reviews a provider has relative to it, the harder its score is pulled towards the market average rather than towards its own, possibly accidental, one or two scores
The effect: a provider with a couple of reviews lands close to the market average and cannot shoot into the top on a few chance votes. A provider with hundreds of reviews has v/(v+m) close to 1 and gets essentially its own honest average.
Plan of the month and of the year
Plans have no five criteria — only likes and dislikes. The top is simpler: net likes (likes minus dislikes) for the period, with no weighting. The three best plans of the month or year get medals 🥇🥈🥉.