Fact-Checking Policy

What fact-checking means on a hosting site

Hosting marketing is a genre of optimistic fiction: everything is unlimited, everything is blazing fast, everything is 99.99 percent available. Our job is to separate what a vendor claims from what a customer gets, and this page describes how HOSTING123 verifies claims before they appear on hosting123.org. The core rule is simple: a claim we could not verify is published as a claim, attributed to whoever made it, or not published at all. Measured facts and quoted claims never blend into one sentence.

Prices: checked at the checkout, not the banner

Every price on this site is verified against the vendor’s actual checkout cart at the time of writing, because the marketing page and the cart disagree surprisingly often: the banner price assumes a 48-month term, the cart adds a setup fee, the promotion applies only to the first term. For each plan we record the promotional price, the term length required to get it, the renewal price it becomes, and the date we looked. Screenshots of the cart are kept as evidence. The renewal price is never omitted, because omitting it is how the industry’s most common bait works, and prices are rechecked on the schedule described in our Corrections Policy.

Performance claims: replaced with measurements

We do not repeat a vendor’s uptime or speed claims as fact, ever. A “99.9 percent uptime guarantee” is reported for what it is, a compensation policy, and sits next to the uptime we actually measured with independent monitoring over a stated date range. Speed claims get the same treatment: response times measured from stated locations on a standardised test site, load behaviour measured under concurrency. Where our measurement contradicts the vendor’s claim, both appear, clearly labelled, and the reader can draw the conclusion. The full measurement method is on the Editorial Standards page.

“Unlimited” and other adjectives: read against the terms

When a plan advertises unlimited storage, bandwidth, or websites, we go to the vendor’s terms of service and acceptable-use policy and find the paragraph where “unlimited” is defined, because there always is one: an inode cap, a CPU-seconds limit, a fair-use clause that lets the host suspend heavy accounts. The review reports the advertised word and the contractual reality side by side, with the relevant clause quoted or referenced. The same applies to “free domain” (usually first year only), “free migration” (usually capped), and “money-back guarantee” (often excluding domains and setup fees). If we could not find the limiting clause, we say the claim is the vendor’s and unverified.

Features: confirmed in the panel, not the brochure

Feature lists are verified from inside our paid test account where feasible: staging exists when we have clicked the staging button, backups exist when we have restored one, the advertised PHP versions are the ones the panel actually offers. Features we could not exercise directly are attributed to the vendor’s documentation. Support quality claims are tested with real tickets from the anonymous account, logged with timestamps.

Sources we use, in order of preference

• Our own measurements and screenshots from paid test accounts, with dates.
• The vendor’s binding documents: terms of service, acceptable-use policy, refund policy, published SLA. These outrank the vendor’s marketing pages when the two conflict, and they conflict often.
• The vendor’s marketing pages and documentation, attributed as such.
• First-hand reader reports, used as leads for retesting rather than as published fact: a reader’s renewal invoice is a reason to recheck pricing, and the recheck is what gets published.

Another review site’s number is not a source. Circular citation is how the same wrong price ends up on twenty sites, and being the twenty-first adds nothing.

Evidence and review before publication

Claims in a review carry their evidence with them: benchmark data with method and date range, prices with capture dates, quoted terms with their source document. Purchase-affecting facts, meaning prices, renewal terms, refund windows, and headline scores, are checked by a second editor against the evidence before publication. Drafts on fast-moving pages, such as discount listings, get the same checkout-level verification with shorter turnaround, and where speed and certainty conflict, we publish less rather than verify less.

When verification fails after publication

If a verified fact stops being true, or if we simply got one wrong, the Corrections Policy takes over: fast fixes, visible notes for material changes, and no silent rewriting of substantive errors. Readers who catch us are doing the site a favour, and the address for it is support@hosting123.org.