Introducing FindHost, a register of hosting providers

Check out findhost.app↗ — a data-driven register of web hosting providers, a marketing vehicle that is hopefully valuable.

# The trouble with researching a web host

Search for a web hosting provider today. You will get all the "best of 2026" lists, and every link carries an affiliate tag. But vendors without a big marketing budget or another inbound channel are almost invisible. There are smaller, independent hosting providers, like fortrabbit, that provide good and innovative services. They are hard to find.

I do most of the 1st level support at fortrabbit, and I am sometimes staggered by how little even good developers know about hosting services. There are many misunderstandings. Most commonly, people assume hosting is a commodity that works the same across all providers, and that the trick is getting the most horsepower per penny.

My job at fortrabbit has always been convincing people that service quality and developer experience matter, and that you can do more with less.

# The story of FindHost

While preparing for our new platform, I researched the hosting market landscape. That helped us redefine our market position. Later on I turned it into a public web hosting guide on our marketing site. But it felt odd to have that sitting directly under our own brand. The tool would be more useful decoupled from fortrabbit, and extended. The project sat in my backlog for a while.

Now, during a holiday trip to France, I plugged out of Slack and found the time to focus on it.

# Looking at the data

I read a lot of hosting providers' web pages.

Every host now seems to advertise AI hosting. Often it means a GPU you can rent, sometimes it means a chatbot in the control panel, and quite often it means nothing at all. Are we becoming the shitty web? (hm)

There are sooooo many hosting providers. A lot of it is still shared hosting. The same product as in 2008, same cPanel, same oversold box, now with SSL. VPS is still everywhere too, some of it still advertising SSD storage. For me, that's mostly noise.

The data is not as specific as I would like it to be. The market is fuzzy. Providers looking for a niche sit between the categories, using the same vocabulary to mean very different things.

Pricing alone is really hard to compare. Most classical providers are paid upfront, and many lock you in for a year. A lot of shared providers also have renewal multiples — from the second year on it costs two or three times more.

# Featured providers

How do I get signal out of this, to push innovative services and small providers? I first tried a scoring system based on a favourable developer experience.

I threw it out and made the bias explicit instead. I did put a heart on a handful of providers. That is my biased opinion.

# Discoveries

Zerops from Czechia was new to me. I also recorded some defunct providers. Do you know Loudcloud? Essentially AWS before AWS, later Opsware. Or DotCloud, which failed as a PaaS and shipped Docker on the way out. The parallel is a little too neat. Also: Hetzner has a South African branch, called xneelo.

# The build

I actually wanted to dogfood Kirby or Statamic, because we need more hands-on hours with both. I ended up with Astro anyway: static output, no database at build or at request time. Astro was new to me. I am still more at home in Vue and Nuxt. The data lives as YAML and markdown in the repository, validated with zod. Each record is one file — fixing a provider means editing that file and opening a pull request.

The website runs on fortrabbit, of course.

You bet the data is structured, so that AI bots can find and cite it.

It has semantic CSS classes, not Tailwind utility class hell. There are actual class names, a couple of stylesheets, and design tokens. It was a breath of fresh air and a bit of a pain to maintain. But OK.

AI (Claude) did most of the coding and most of the data aggregation. That is disclosed on the site, per record, in the data.

The data is CC BY 4.0↗. Take it, fork it, sell it, with credit. If we stop maintaining it, someone else can carry it.

# Anyway

Working on something isolated — no dependencies on the rest of our stack, no coordination, no meetings — was fun. It is a pet project. It may grow, it may die. There are ideas: reviews, a price signal, local search. For now it is a register, and it is more honest than the first page of results.

Corrections welcome, on GitHub↗.