The best service, not the cheapest
We are not a price comparison site. The score answers one question: which service is the best, judged by its features, how well it protects your privacy and how far the provider can be trusted. Price is one criterion among several: a fair price counts in full, only an overpriced one loses points. Whether the best service is worth its price is your call in a second step: sort and filter the list by price.
- What makes a good service weighs most. Each category sets its own criteria and weights and publishes them on its methodology page.
- Costs weigh little and count along fixed price points: a fair price scores in full, an overpriced one loses. A low price never makes up for weak privacy or trust.
- Missing data never helps: an unknown value counts with the typical value of the category (the median), never better. Proofs such as an audit or a no-logs case proven in court count only when we find them.
- Hard limits: weak trust or a very young brand cap the total score, however good the rest looks; so does, for example, a VPN that logs what its users do.
- Absolute, never relative to the best: a score changes only when the product’s own data changes, and 100 does not claim perfection.
Score weights
| Criterion | Weight | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Costs | 10 % |
entry server, billed monthly or yearly, whichever is cheaper for one year |
| Features | 20 % |
delivery time, remote management (IPMI, KVM, rescue), operating systems and own ISO, custom configuration, short minimum term, IPv6, DDoS protection, API |
| Locations | 10 % |
number of data centre countries |
| Anonymity | 20 % |
what sign-up asks for (username only, e-mail, name and address, phone), whether an ID is ever checked, access over Tor/VPN, onion site, payment with Monero |
| Freedom & due process | 10 % |
complaints judged under local law or forwarded instead of instant takedowns, Tor relays and exits, VPNs and mail servers allowed, warrant canary |
| Trust | 25 % |
company seat, incidents, company and brand age, ownership, transparency |
| Community | 5 % |
average ratings on App Store, Google Play and Trustpilot, damped, neutral with too little data |
Schema version 2026-11-01.1
Community counts damped: only the average ratings on App Store, Google Play and Trustpilot, weighted by count, as deviation from the category median, capped to the 5th–95th percentile, neutral below 50 ratings — new hosts are not penalised. Single experience reports, Reddit and X posts do not count, so the score cannot be steered by bought or targeted reviews.
The score depends on the country (availability) and is calculated per key country.
Value states
- known
- The value is published and proven by a quote.
- not published
- The provider does not publish the value (shown as such, never as 0).
- only in the app
- The value is only visible in the provider’s app.
- not applicable
- The attribute does not apply to this product.
- unknown
- We have no proven value yet.
Checked and verified
“checked” is the last time the source was found unchanged; “verified” is the last time the value was read from the source. “updated” is the last real value change.
Is the double s a typo?
No. The double s at the end of our name stands for sourced & synced. sourced: every value has a source, a quote and a snapshot. synced: our monitoring compares every value with its source continuously, and each value carries its check date.
Sponsoring and affiliate links
Sponsored slots are labelled and have no influence on score or ranking. Affiliate links are marked. Our principles →
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Alerts
Alerts come from the same sourced data as the pages and go out in one daily mail. How the alerts work →