Opinionated field guide to choosing a web host. An openly-licensed register of web hosting providers, described by attributes. Published by fortrabbit, who are in the register too.
I do support at a small hosting company: Even good developers often know little about hosting. How to evaluate a hosting provider? Search for "Best PHP hosting" and you get drowned in affiliate pages. Smaller providers without marketing budget are invisible. It's so much shared hosting and so much boring VPS. There is interesting PaaS. The project is based on internal research. This summer holidays I burned some tokens and learned some new tricks. The site is based on Astro and features Pagefind.
FindHost holds a few hundred providers. I try to focus on a maintainable list with a few providers in each section and region. There is also a heart on a couple of dozen providers I happen to know and like more. This may or may not give some signal.
I have of course not tested all hosting providers. The data is superfical, shallow in places. Categories are a bit blurry because the market is. Pricing is recorded as bands rather than figures, a price tracker rots in a week. *Disclosure*: fortrabbit - my company - is featured too! It has its own record and a conflict-of-interest section on it. The project is therefore also a marketing stunt.
The data is CC BY 4.0 with JSON and CSV exports, and every page has a markdown twin. Contributions, corrections and additions welcome!
fortrabbit