Ownership & Funding
Why this page exists
Before you trust a hosting review, you should know who owns the site publishing it and who pays for it, because the hosting review business has a structural secret: several of the loudest “independent” review sites are owned by the very hosting conglomerates whose brands keep winning their comparisons. This page states plainly how HOSTING123 (hosting123.org) is owned and funded, so you can weigh our reviews with full information.
Ownership
HOSTING123 is owned and operated independently by the small team of editors who run it. Specifically:
- No hosting company, domain registrar, or parent company of either owns any part of this site.
- No member of the team is employed by, holds equity in, or receives a salary from any company we review.
- No investor, sponsor, or outside shareholder holds a stake that could direct our coverage. There is no such stake, because there is no such investor.
- The site has never been paid to publish, suppress, or alter a review, and there is no mechanism by which it could be: scores are set by the process on our Editorial Standards page.
We do not publish individual editor names, a choice explained on our About page: anonymous test accounts stay anonymous longer when the testers do too. If ownership of the site ever changes, this page changes with it, visibly.
Where the money comes from
HOSTING123 has two revenue sources, and only two.
Affiliate commissions
The majority of our revenue. When you click through to a hosting provider from our pages and buy a plan, the provider or its affiliate network may pay us a commission. It costs you nothing extra, and the mechanics, including the cookies involved, are described in our Cookie Policy and Disclaimer.
Display advertising
Standard display ads served on the site. Advertisers buy space, not coverage: an ad placement never includes review influence, and the boundaries are documented on the Advertise With Us page.
That is the complete list. We do not sell reader data, we do not charge hosts to be listed, we do not sell “premium placements” in comparisons, and we do not publish paid reviews.
The conflict of interest, stated honestly
Affiliate funding creates a real tension that no disclosure paragraph dissolves: commissions differ between hosts, and a site paid by commissions has an incentive to favour the hosts that pay best. We would rather describe the tension and show the controls than pretend the tension does not exist. The controls:
- Blind writing: the people who test and score hosts do not see commission rates. Links are attached after rankings are settled.
- Data before links: rankings come from benchmarks, measured uptime, support tests, and pricing verification, all documented per review with dates and methods.
- Zero-commission entries: hosts with no affiliate program are bought, tested, and ranked identically, and some occupy top positions in our comparisons. Their presence is the ongoing audit of the system.
- Renewal pricing as a scoring pillar: the commission model rewards sites that push expensive long terms; scoring renewal honesty pushes the other way, deliberately.
- Public corrections: when we get something wrong, the Corrections Policy makes the fix visible rather than quiet.
What would change this page
If the site ever accepted sponsorship revenue, took investment, added a revenue source, or changed hands, this page would be updated before or alongside the change taking effect, not after readers noticed. A funding disclosure that lags reality is a decoration, and this one is meant to be load-bearing. Questions about anything here, including questions we have not thought to answer: support@hosting123.org.
