Introducing Hostingstep – Your Hosting Recommendation Platform
Hostingstep.com is the performance data-backed web hosting recommendations platform that started in 2016 and went for a significant overhaul and relaunched in 2021. Hostingstep was created with the single aim of recommending web hosting companies required for techy or non-techy site owners.
There are hundreds of review sites on the internet, yet only a few test and recommend hosting companies. However, most sites do a single-time test, and often the results are outdated.
I run a web agency where we host more than 50+ sites, yet every time we launch a new project, we struggle to find the right hosting for our needs. I can simply use one of our existing hosts, but I focus on diversifying our hosting providers for better reliability.
At times, a few hosting providers create some messy issues like SSL doesn’t renew automatically, and the site will be down. There are some situations where the support won't be available at the right time to fix things, and there are lot more things I can say further.
This is how I founded Hostingstep.com for our own needs but now, launching it as our separate project.
What Does Hostingstep Do?
Through Hostingstep.com, we are reviewing the popular hosting services by signing up with each hosting provider as a customer and started monitoring their services through some of the industry’s best tools like Pingdom, WebPageTest, etc.
Instead of writing a generic review that doesn’t add any value, I went for these data-backed blog posts written posts like Fastest WordPress Hosting that adds great value in finding the fast host. Since we collect data from each hosting company, we compile those data month-wise and then use them to write our data-driven blog posts for the internet community.
Some of the exciting facts about Hostingstep.com are
Hosting companies are recommended purely based on the data. The complete dataset is available in the individual blog posts, and users can verify the same by testing the demo sites.
Hostingstep also promises their top-recommendations are not inclined to any particular host, and they change based on the new data points. They don’t have an exclusive partnership with hosting companies to seal permanent top positions for them in simple words.
They also do a recurring 24/7/365 days of the performance test. Thus their list of top hosting companies is upto the mark based on new requirements. For example, Hostingstep is the only site to analyze the Core Web Vitals data of top hosting companies.
What is the data measured by Hostingstep?
Hostingstep does a variety of test, and the current list of tests are
- Average Server Response Time (TTFB)
- Uptime
- Load Testing
- Global TTFB
- Core Web Vitals
Each test is unique in its way, and they are essential metrics to evaluate any type of hosting service. Now, let’s see each test in brief.
Average Server Response Time – Pingdom carries out this test. The tool monitors the demo sites from 21 North American locations for 60 seconds once, averages the data, and then lists the average response time. Approximately every site is tested 10,100+ times in a month, and Hostingstep uses the same data to rank hosting companies.
Uptime – The same Pingdom data is used to measure the uptime performance. No matter in using the best hosting that comes with poor uptime. This test ensures that the hosting is reliable.
Load Testing – Hostingstep does three different tests to measure the performance of all types of hosting like Shared, VPS, and Managed WordPress Hosting. Loader.io is the tool involved here, which tests the sites under various circumstances to find the best host in terms of load testing.
Global TTFB – Few of the sites get traffic from multiple countries. In that case, the global TTFB should be measured to ensure the host is fast for all the global audience. The demo site is tested from 10 global locations to calculate the average global TTFB.
Core Web Vitals – HostingStep is the first site to measure the Core Web Vitals performance of more than 15 hosting companies at a time. This test data helps show you which host can likely get a pass score in Core Web Vitals.
What are the essential hosting resources created at Hostingstep?
Hostingstep constantly adds & tests new hosting companies. Some of the trending posts loved by the site owners community are
- Fastest WordPress Hosting based on Server Response Time & Load Testing
- Recommending alternative hosting services. For example, this post of SiteGround Alternatives recommends alternative services based on real data. There are also optimization guides to improve the load time of your website.
Hostingstep also promises to bring exciting new blog posts that can help you in website optimization, review reports of future-focused hosting companies, and much more.
Concluding
If you closely look into the site Hostingstep.com, you can see their blog posts are mostly based on data from tests and monitoring tools. Focusing on the future, they mostly recommend VPS and Managed WordPress hosting companies instead of shared hosting, which is not a good option for performance.
Thus, Hostingstep is not a single-type audience. Be it Beginner, mid-level or advanced, Hostingstep can provide you with solid recommendations. Even instead of recommending companies, they recommend a particular plan of each hosting that provides the best value for money.
Focused on the community-driven writeup, HostingStep actively writes content to solve the hosting issues for all global users.