How we test and rank web hosting in India
We buy hosting plans with our own money, monitor them around the clock, and rank them purely on measured performance. This page explains exactly how, so you can judge the data for yourself.
How we measure
Every host is tested the same way, so the comparison is fair.
An identical test page
The same lightweight page sits on every host, with no CDN and no caching. This isolates the host’s own performance, so we measure the server and not a delivery network.
Checked from Mumbai
Each site is checked every 60 seconds from a Mumbai probe, so the numbers reflect what real Indian visitors experience, not performance measured from the US or Europe.
A rolling 90 days
Rankings use the last 90 days of data, updated daily. Recent enough to reflect reality, long enough to smooth out one-off blips.
The two numbers that matter
Most hosting decisions come down to these two measurements.
Is the site reachable?
Uptime is the share of time a site is online. The gap between 99.9% and 99.99% sounds tiny but isn’t. We also record how many separate outages happened, because one brief blip is very different from dozens.
How fast does it respond?
Time to first byte is how long the server takes to start replying, measured from Mumbai. Lower is faster. It is the truest single measure of server speed for Indian visitors.
How we score and rank
Each host gets a weighted score out of 100. The host with the highest score ranks first, and no host can pay to rank higher.
How hosts get on the leaderboard
Who we choose to measure, how a host can ask to be added, and what decides position.
We choose hosts on market relevance
We measure the hosts Indian buyers are actually searching for and comparing. Relevance decides the list, not company size, domain authority, or whether a host has ever spoken to us.
If a host is widely used in India, we want it on the leaderboard whether it likes the idea or not. Every plan is bought at the public price, with no discount, coupon or vendor account.
Hosts who ask to be measured
We are sometimes approached by hosts who would like to be added. Where search demand does not yet justify adding a host on relevance alone, they can take part by covering the cost of being measured.
Every plan on this site is bought at the public price and monitored continuously, which is an ongoing cost for each host we add. That fee covers buying the plan and monitoring it. Nothing else.
Hosts taking part on this basis are marked on the leaderboard, so you can see which ones they are.
How ranking is decided
By measurement, and only by measurement. Position comes from recorded uptime, response time and consistency over the rolling 90 day window, calculated the same way for every host on the board.
A host that covers its measurement cost can rank last, and we publish whatever the monitoring records. There is no advance notice of results, and no way to withdraw a figure that turns out to be unflattering.
If a host stops taking part, measurement ends and the record stays up with a note of the date it stopped. We do not delete results.
How we label hosts
Every tag is computed from the data by a fixed rule, never assigned by hand. A host can earn more than one if the data supports it. Every other host shows no label, because we don’t invent tags to fill space.
The host with the lowest average response time over the window.
Among the top three performers, the one with the best long-term price. Performance comes first, so a cheap but slow host cannot earn this.
Lowest on both the first-year price and the renewal price. Genuinely cheap to start and to keep.
We pay for every plan
This is what makes our data different. No free vendor accounts, no sponsored placements. Every plan was bought at the normal public price, like any customer.
The actual invoices, with personal details redacted for privacy:
What we don’t claim
Being honest about the limits matters as much as the data itself.
- We currently monitor entry-level shared hosting plans, the plans most first sites use. Higher tiers and VPS plans may perform differently, and we plan to add them over time.
- Our primary measurement is from Mumbai. Performance from other cities or countries can differ, and deeper multi-location data is something we are building.
- Our data builds forward over time. A host monitored for 90 days has a more reliable picture than one added last week, and we label the window honestly.
- We measure server response and uptime, which are the biggest factors in real-world speed. Your final site speed also depends on your theme, plugins, images, and code.
How we stay independent
Some links on HostLatency are affiliate links. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and that funds the hosting accounts and keeps the site running. It never affects the rankings. The order of the leaderboard is set entirely by measured performance, and a host earns its position the same way whether or not we earn from it. We would rank a host last even if it paid the highest commission, because the data decides and not the payout. That independence is the whole point. If our rankings could be bought, the data would be worthless, to you and to us.
Questions about our method? We are happy to explain anything. Get in touch.