Methodology Changelog

The Completeness component (25 of 100 points) is rebuilt. Until now it measured whether a profile was filled in: description, logo, segment, founding year, links. Most claimed hosts reached 25/25 quickly and the component stopped discriminating. From 13 August 2026 it measures willingness to disclose: verified answers to the questions buyers actually ask, most of which no host in this market publishes in structured form.

Every fact is machine-verified or human-reviewed with evidence before it earns a single point. Self-reported claims earn zero until verified. Every point decays: a fact that is not re-verified or re-attested inside its window stops earning. A declared fact our checks contradict is marked disputed publicly, showing both the declaration and what we observed. Facts a host has not disclosed render as "Not disclosed" on its profile, because the blank is a finding.

Scoring: each host segment has an applicable subset of the registry below. Completeness equals 25 times verified points earned over applicable points, capped at 25. Trust, Freshness, and Performance are untouched by this release. The MSP Ranking Index (MRI) is untouched. The signal-augmentation micro-bonuses that previously fed Completeness retire into the fact registry so nothing earns twice; signal bonuses to other components are unchanged.

The transition credit. Rescoring a directory of 30,000 hosts overnight without warning would be self-harm dressed as rigor. Instead, every host scored before the cutover keeps its number on day one through a transition credit equal to the gap between its previous Completeness and its verified-fact Completeness. The credit decays linearly to zero over 90 days, reaching zero on 11 November 2026. It is never hidden: it is shown on the host profile, exposed in the API as transition_credit with its expiry, excluded from Most Improved rankings, and unavailable to any host claimed after the cutover date. A reader can subtract it. Hiding it would be dishonest; showing it is the point.

Completeness measures how much a host discloses, not how good it is. That distinction is printed next to the component everywhere it appears.

Applicable totals per segment: PURE_HOST 43.5, AGENCY_HOSTING 40.5, HOSTING_TECH 35.5, OTHER 30.5 raw points. A field outside a segment neither earns nor counts against that segment's denominator.

Not an algorithm change, disclosed anyway: the Top 50 and Top 100 ranking pages now list PURE_HOST companies only. Agencies, managed service providers, and mis-catalogued listings no longer compete in a web hosting leaderboard. No score changed; the eligible population did.

Google Places coverage spans roughly 1.5 percent of the directory. A host with thousands of Trustpilot reviews previously scored as if it had no review signal at all when Google data was missing. Under v2.2, Trustpilot substitutes at a discounted ceiling (rating up to 6 of 8 points, volume up to 4 of 7) only when Google is absent. Google remains dominant whenever it exists, and poor secondary-platform ratings still never subtract.

Trustpilot (up to 2 points) and G2 (up to 2 points) come online as corroboration bonuses inside the Trust component, with volume thresholds tuned per platform. Deliberately asymmetric: good ratings on secondary platforms add small bonuses, bad ones do not subtract, so a drive-by complaint on one platform cannot outvote thousands of corroborated reviews.

A layer of verifiable, evidence-backed micro-signals (support response time, renewal price delta, documented free SSL, IPv6 and HTTP/3 support, status page presence) begins adding fractional, continuously time-decaying bonuses on top of the four base components. Every signal carries an evidence URL and a capture date. Each component stays capped at 25.

HostList Ranking Index: four equally weighted components, Trust, Completeness, Freshness, Performance, each 0 to 25, summing to a 0 to 100 score computed identically for every active host in the directory. The two commitments that have never changed: fully algorithmic, and no paid placement of any kind.