Hostingstep.com earns money through affiliate programs. When you buy a hosting account from any of our recommended services, we might get a commission (it doesn’t cost you anything extra).
We don’t run any third-party ads like AdSense or publish sponsored content. We only make money when people like you get a hosting account through our link.
The affiliate revenue we earn from hosting companies is used to purchase and renew hosting services, enabling continuous performance monitoring.
As of August 2026, we’ve been paying customers of 34 hosting providers and 5 monitoring tools. We have an invoice page where we upload our invoices for transparency.
Expenses on testing tools:
- Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool – $65/month
- Loader.io – $49/month
- SpeedVitals – $19/month
- Other tools – $49/month
Expenses on hosting companies:
The expenses for hosting services vary by company. We signed up with shared hosting companies at their introductory pricing, usually less than $5/month, and we renew the same plan between $10-$20/month (ex. Bluehost renews at $8.99/month while SiteGround renews at $17.99/month).
For managed WordPress hosting companies, we pay either monthly or annually, and the average cost is between $300 and $400 per year. We currently test at least 5-7 managed hosting providers.
When we make a profit, we strive to reinvest by opening accounts with new hosting providers for testing. For example, we added 9 new hosting companies for testing in 2025. This is how we scaled our benchmarking from just 5 companies in 2016 to 34 companies in 2026.