Methodology · version 1.0
Every number here came from something we recorded
- Providers tracked
- 339
The six components
| Component | Weight | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | 25% | Where this provider's prices sit against the others we track for the same services, within its own cohort — retail packages against retail, wholesale rates against wholesale. | Automated |
| Uptime | 20% | Share of hourly reachability checks that succeeded over the trailing 30 days. | Hourly checks |
| Delivery speed | 20% | How quickly our own test orders started delivering. | First-party test orders |
| Retention | 20% | How much of what was delivered was still there 30 days later. | First-party test orders |
| Refill | 10% | Whether refill guarantees were honoured when we claimed them. | First-party test orders |
| Domain age | 5% | How long the domain has been registered. Weak signal, low weight. | Automated |
Missing data stays missing
Minimum 3 components
A provider with fewer than 3 measured components gets no score at all. It shows “Insufficient data” and is excluded from every ranked list. It still appears in the directory with whatever we do hold — prices, uptime, domain age.
No midpoint defaults
An unmeasured component is never quietly set to 50, or to the average, or to anything else. The remaining weights are renormalised over what we actually have, and the breakdown on each provider page states exactly which components contributed.
How the data is gathered
Prices
Collected twice weekly from each provider's public services page, normalised to USD at the moment of capture with the original figure and exchange rate retained. Where a provider lists many variants of one service we record the cheapest genuine variant, plus the variant count and median so that figure can be read in context. Promotional rows priced far beneath a provider's own median are excluded — quoting them would misrepresent what the service actually costs.
Uptime
Every provider is requested hourly. A day without a successful response marks it unreachable; a week marks it dead. Uptime only counts toward a score once at least 24 checks exist.
Domain age
From WHOIS, refreshed monthly. It carries the lowest weight of any component because it is weak evidence — an old domain is not a good provider, it has merely existed longer.
Delivery, retention and refill
From orders we place and pay for ourselves, then measure at delivery, 7 days and 30 days. There is no way to obtain these numbers without buying, which is why most providers do not have them yet.
What we do not claim
- We have not tested every provider. We have placed no test orders yet, so no provider currently carries a delivery, retention or refill score. A directory claiming hands-on testing of hundreds of providers is claiming something nobody has done.
- We publish no invented reviews. Review and rating structured data is emitted only where real verified reviews exist in our database. We currently hold 0.
- Placement never buys rank. Paid placement is labelled inline wherever it appears and never alters a score, a rank, or a sort order.
- Prices go stale. Every price on this site carries its capture date. Providers change pricing without notice; always check the provider before ordering.
Changelog
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | 2026-08-17 | Initial published criteria. Six components, minimum three required, weights renormalised over measured components only. |