About Us
Hosting 123 is an independent news site about the web hosting business. We cover provider news and acquisitions, outages, security disclosures, cloud and VPS, domains and registrars, WordPress hosting, and what hosting actually costs once the promotional term runs out. The site is free to read, has no paywall, and is paid for by advertising.
What we cover, and who reads it
Our readers are people with something to lose when a host has a bad night. Site owners who cannot get a page to load. Developers who inherited someone else’s cPanel account. Agencies hosting forty client sites on a reseller plan. Small businesses whose booking form is the front door of the business. They do not need the internet explained to them. They need to know what happened, when, and what it means for the invoice or the migration they are weighing up.
The site is organised into News, Industry, Reviews, Outages, Security, Cloud, Domains, WordPress, Deals and Guides. Outages exists because an incident deserves a running timeline with timestamps, not one post written after everything came back. Deals exists because a discount is only a discount if somebody tells you the second-year price.
Why this site exists
The people who started Hosting 123 worked inside hosting companies before they wrote about them. Support queues on shared hosting, overnight sysadmin rotations, time on an abuse desk, which is where you learn what one bad neighbour on a shared server does to everyone else’s response times. That background is the only credential we claim, and it is useful in one narrow way. We know which numbers in the marketing copy mean something.
Unlimited bandwidth, with a fair-use clause that lets the host throttle you at its discretion. Uptime promised to three decimal places, measured per calendar month, scheduled maintenance excluded, remedied by a credit you must request in writing inside a short window. Inode limits, which are the real ceiling on a shared plan, documented in a knowledge-base article and never within a screen of the price. None of that is fraud. It is written for the person selling.
What pushed us into starting the site was the state of hosting reviews. Search for the best host for anything and you get a ranked list where the ranking is for sale, and where the order tracks the commission rate rather than the service. The two facts that decide whether a host is any good are the two nobody publishes: how the company behaved during a real incident, and what the bill becomes at renewal. We built the site around those two questions.
The renewal table that cost us money in the first month
One of the first things we published was a plain table of promotional prices next to renewal prices for popular shared and WordPress plans, with term length and prepay requirement spelled out. Nothing clever. Half of it came from checkout pages, the rest from invoices on accounts we pay for ourselves. It made several well-known plans look worse than their landing pages do, because the three-year prepay headline and the one-year renewal price are often not in the same ballpark.
Within weeks an affiliate manager asked us to drop the renewal column, or at least move it below the fold, and mentioned the partnership in the same message. We kept the table and the relationship ended. That settled early something we would otherwise have argued about for a year: we take no affiliate commission from hosting providers at all, on any page, including Deals. Our ownership and funding page sets out what we take instead.
The one we got wrong
Early on we wrote up a multi-hour outage at a large shared host and dated it from the provider’s own incident timeline, which put the start at mid-morning. Readers wrote in the same day with monitoring logs, traceroutes and support-ticket timestamps showing it had begun hours earlier, while the status page was still green. We had used the most convenient source rather than the best one, and we corrected the piece.
The rule that came out of it now governs the whole Outages section. We do not date an incident from a status page alone. We use our own external checks, reader reports with timestamps we can compare, and the provider’s statement, and where a status page stayed green through a confirmed failure we say so, because that gap is part of the story. Our corrections policy explains how errors get logged, and our fact-checking page covers how a piece is verified before it runs.
How a normal day runs here
Mornings start with the boring sweep: our own monitoring for the hosts we track, the overnight mail, status pages, changelogs, registrar and registry notices. The tip inbox is often the fastest outage detector we have, because a reader whose store is down writes to us before any status page updates. Then the reading, most of it unglamorous. Acquisition announcements. Filings that explain a coming price rise eighteen months before customers feel it. Advisories for control panels and for the plugins WordPress hosts install by default.
The other half of the job is maintenance nobody sees. We keep paid accounts on hosts we cover so renewal invoices arrive to us rather than being described to us. We re-check checkout pages, because prices and term lengths move quietly and a table left alone for six months is a table that lies. When a control-panel vendor changes its licence terms or a registry raises a wholesale domain price, we work out what that does to a small customer’s bill next year.
Ownership, money, and the wall between them
Hosting 123 is independently owned and run by its founding editors, who still write and edit here. There is no parent conglomerate, no investor with a hosting interest, and no political party or state money behind any of it. Advertising pays for the work and the site stays free.
Advertisers get no preview of coverage, no veto over it, and no influence on the order of anything. Nobody who sells advertising sits in an editorial meeting or reads a review before publication. Sponsored posts are labeled, look different from our journalism, and are never written by the people who cover the beat. Those rules are set out in our editorial standards, and the same arrangement from the buyer’s side is on our advertising page.
What we do not do
We do not sell position in a ranking, take payment to review a product, or let a provider approve copy before it runs. We do not publish sponsored content dressed as news, and we do not run coupon pages whose text a marketing team has to sign off. We do not accept an embargo with conditions attached about framing, and we do not pull an accurate price table because it hurts somebody’s conversion rate. That costs money. It cost us money in the first month, so it is not a hypothetical position.
We are also not neutral about outcomes for readers. When a host’s renewal pricing is punishing, or its status page is unreliable, or its migration process traps customers, we say so in plain words and show the working. What we will not do is say it because a competitor paid us to.
How to reach us
One address reaches the newsroom: support@hosting123.org. Editors read and triage it themselves, so an outage tip, a factual error, a pitch and a question about a price we published all land in the same place. Outage reports with a timestamp and a location are worth more to us than anything else we receive.
Our contact page explains how to label a message so it reaches the right editor quickly, and what to expect by way of a reply. If you are writing about something sensitive, such as an incident inside a company you work for, read that page first.
