Why I Built This Site
I spent eight years building WordPress sites for other people, and the question that came up most often was also the one nobody could answer straight: which host, which theme, which builder. Every answer I found online was written by someone earning a commission on it, including the answers that claimed not to be.
What bothered me was not the commissions. It was that almost none of those pages showed their work. A number would appear with no source attached, and there was no way for a reader to check it or to reproduce it.
So this site takes the opposite approach. I do not test these tools on my own sites and I do not pretend to. What I do is read the documentation, pull the published benchmark and field data, work through the complaints that keep recurring in support forums, and tell you where those three disagree. When a number is not verifiable, I say that instead of inventing one.
My Timeline
Started as a front-end developer
Freelance WordPress work in Sacramento, mostly for local businesses. Enough client sites to learn which parts of a stack cause trouble later.
Moved into affiliate publishing
Started writing about the tools I had been configuring for clients, and quickly ran into how thin most of the published comparisons were.
Core Web Vitals changed the question
Once page experience became a ranking signal, hosting and theme choices stopped being a matter of taste. That is when I started collecting field data seriously.
Settled on a research method
Vendor documentation and status pages first, then published field data, then what users actually report in the support communities. Where those three disagree, that disagreement is the story.
Launched HostingForAffiliates
One site covering the four tools that most affiliate stacks are built from, written so a reader can follow the sourcing rather than trust the byline.
Reviewed against current data
Pricing, plan limits and published performance figures rechecked against the vendors’ own pages and against the Chrome UX Report dataset.
How I Review
I have not personally run these tools on my own sites, and nothing on this site should be read as a first-hand test. Every review here is a synthesis of published sources, and each one names the sources it leans on.
The order is always the same. The vendor's own documentation comes first, because that is where plan limits, resource caps and renewal terms are actually stated rather than implied. Then published performance data: Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds and the field measurements behind them, rather than a single synthetic run on a machine you cannot see. Then the forums, where the same complaint turning up across hundreds of threads carries more weight than any single benchmark.
Where I quote a figure, I tell you whose figure it is. When they contradict each other, that contradiction goes in the review; it is usually the most useful thing on the page. And where something can only be settled on your own site, the review points you at the free tool that settles it: PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix both report on a URL you own, in about a minute.
I earn affiliate commissions from some of the tools covered here, disclosed on every page. Rankings are not sold and commission rates do not change the order.
Get in Touch
Spotted a figure that has gone stale, or want to point me at a source I missed? Use the contact form. Corrections are the most useful mail this site gets, and they do get made.