Methodology Changelog

The replacement date promised on 15 August is 3 November 2026. Claimed hosts receive the notice required by the protocol, with their own before and after numbers, at least 14 days before that date. Until then HRI v2.2 remains current and nothing about any score changes.

Nobody drops on the day. On 3 November 2026 every listing scored before that date receives a transition credit equal to the gap between its old Completeness and its verified-fact Completeness, so its total is unchanged. The credit then decays in a straight line to zero on 1 February 2027. Every fact verified before that turns expiring credit into permanent points.

Why the credit window moved with the date. The window runs 90 days from the effective date, so rescheduling the cutover reschedules the expiry. The July notice quoted 11 November 2026 because that was 90 days after the date announced then. The end-state figure each host was quoted has not changed: it is calculated from verified facts, not from the calendar.

The v3.0 cutover announced for 13 August 2026 did not ship. HRI v2.2 remains the current methodology, every live score still follows v2.2, and no v3.0 placement change has been applied.

A replacement date will be published here before scores move. The transition credit will begin on that rescheduled date and run for 90 days; it has not started decaying.

Resolved. The replacement date is 3 November 2026, announced in the entry at the top of this page.

Until today the affiliate disclosure on this site ended with the sentence "Partner or referral relationships never change HRI, sort order, or ranked list position." That was not true, and it appeared on 17 pages. The v2.2 Completeness component counts a recorded affiliate link as a filled profile field, worth 2 of 100 points. Thirteen listings hold it today.

Nobody buys those 2 points and no money changes hands for them. It is a fifteen-year-old habit of profile scoring, counting a field because the field is filled, and it long predates anyone thinking about what it implied. That does not matter much: a score is a score, and the sentence claimed a firewall that had a hole in it. The sentence is corrected and the exception is now stated plainly wherever the disclosure appears.

Why the points are still there today. Removing them now would move 12 of the 13 affected listings, which is a subtractive change and owes 14 days notice plus a transition credit under the protocol. HRI v3.0 retires it when the postponed cutover ships by scoring Completeness only from verified disclosures. Shipping a second subtractive change before that cutover would stack two credits and make both unreadable, so the exception remains disclosed until the dated change does the work.

One thing v3.0 does not fix. The MSP Ranking Index keeps the v2.2 profile sum, so the same 2 points survive there after the rescheduled v3.0 cutover. No MSP listing currently holds an affiliate link, so nothing is affected today, but the code path is real and it is recorded here rather than left to be discovered. It is removed at the next MRI version boundary, announced here in the usual way.

Two facts join the registry below: a security contact and plan resource limits. Both ship worth zero points. They appear on host profiles and in the dashboard checklist from today, and they score at a later version boundary, announced here 14 days ahead in the usual way.

No score moves today. Completeness divides verified points by applicable points, so a fact worth zero changes neither side of that fraction. The per-segment totals printed under the table are the same numbers as yesterday. This is deliberate: v3.0 carries a transition credit through 1 February 2027, and pricing new fields on top of it would stack two adjustments and make both unreadable. Hosts get the months in between to answer at no cost.

Security contact. An RFC 9116 file at /.well-known/security.txt naming who to tell about a vulnerability. Detected automatically, so it costs a host nothing to disclose, and only that exact path counts: a security contact reachable only by searching the site is not reachable. We honour the expiry date the file declares, so the entry stops counting as current the day the host said it would rather than whenever our own re-check falls due, and a file that has lapsed or gone missing is shown on the profile as lapsed rather than reverting to a blank. Of the 35 highest-scoring independent hosts in the directory, 13 publish a valid one today. The other 22 are the point: the blank is the finding.

Plan resource limits. The inode, CPU, entry process, memory and IO caps a plan actually enforces, what happens when a customer reaches one, and the page where those numbers are published. Nothing in the registry recorded a single comparable capacity number before this, so two plans identical on price could differ several-fold on the limit that decides whether a busy site stays up. Enforcing no hard limits is a complete answer and is recorded as one. A limits page carrying no numbers earns nothing, the same rule the backup field already applies to a restore cost of "contact us".

Neither field can be bought, bundled, or waived, and neither is available to sponsors on any terms. That is the same sentence as every other entry on this page because it is the same rule.

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. When the rescheduled cutover ships, 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 1 February 2027. 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: when two hosts hold the same HRI, ranking surfaces previously ordered them arbitrarily, so equal hosts could swap places between page builds. Ties now resolve deterministically: the host with more verified disclosures ranks first, then the stronger Trust component, then alphabetical order. No score moved; equal scores became reproducible, and the first tiebreak rewards the same thing the index does, publicly checkable facts.

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.