Affiliate disclosure

Mainstay is reader-supported. Some of the outbound links to hosting companies on this site are affiliate links, which means that if you click one and later buy a plan, the host or its affiliate network pays us a commission. It costs you nothing extra — the price is the same as if you'd gone direct. This is disclosed here and inline next to the links themselves, in line with FTC guidance.

What commission does not buy

Commission does not buy a ranking, a score, a softer criticism, or a place on any list. Our order is decided by business fit — uptime SLA, support, professional email, scalability and honest pricing — and the figures come from hosts' published SLAs and checkout pages, not from what they pay. A host that pays a higher commission does not move up, and one that pays nothing is not left out. If our assessment and our commercial interest ever conflict, the assessment wins; that's the only way a review is worth reading.

Where we recommend what pays us nothing

The clearest proof that commission doesn't drive our advice is where we send you to services that pay us nothing. For professional email, we usually recommend Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 — neither of which is an affiliate partner — because they are simply the better answer than host-bundled mailboxes. Some infrastructure providers we mention run no cash affiliate program at all. We recommend them where they're genuinely the right fit, because being useful is what keeps you coming back.

How the links work

Affiliate links on this site route through our own /go/ redirect and are marked so search engines treat them as sponsored. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any hosting company we review; brand names are used only to identify the services. If you'd rather not use an affiliate link, you can always type a host's address into your browser directly — our recommendation is the same either way.