my goal was also creating a database of hosting providers and my main focus was on the hosting provider, their website and all the locations that they provide.
These are some aggregated data from it:
providers 249
locations 224
links 863
countries 60
I am happy to see more websites like this within this space to be honest. Its just a cool endeavour and I support some passion within it hopefully same as yours so your project is really cool in my personal opinion :-)
How did you find the data. My way of getting the locations was a bit more semi-automatic. I first created a semi-automatic way of finding looking glass links and then I created a script which loops over each link and tries to find relevant information. Some other information was set manually sometimes for all these providers. This could in theory support re-runs as well so if providers add more locations. I could auto-add them :), what are your thoughts on my project if I may ask?
Have a good day :-)
esher•34m ago
How to evaluate a hosting provider? Search for "Best PHP hosting" and you get drowned in affiliate pages. Smaller providers without marketing budget are invisible. It's so much shared hosting and so much boring VPS. There is interesting PaaS.
The project is based on internal research. This summer holidays I burned some tokens and learned some new tricks. The site is based on Astro and features Pagefind.
FindHost holds a few hundred providers. I try to focus on a maintainable list with a few providers in each section and region. There is also a heart on a couple of dozen providers I happen to know and like more. This may or may not give some signal.
I have of course not tested all hosting providers. The data is superfical, shallow in places. Categories are a bit blurry because the market is. Pricing is recorded as bands rather than figures, a price tracker rots in a week.
*Disclosure*: fortrabbit - my company - is featured too! It has its own record and a conflict-of-interest section on it. The project is therefore also a marketing stunt.
The data is CC BY 4.0 with JSON and CSV exports, and every page has a markdown twin. Contributions, corrections and additions welcome!
Some fun facts: Remember DotCloud which failed as a PaaS but shipped Docker on the way out, which is a neat parallel to Loudcloud (AWS before AWS) becoming Opsware.