Who writes this, how we test, and how we are paid
Who
I am Ricardo Mulder. I run Altern Media, a small Dutch company that builds and runs its own web projects, and I have been renting VPSes for them for years, long before anyone called an assistant an agent.
I have run OpenClaw since its first release in January 2026. First on a machine at home against local models through Ollama and llama.cpp, then on VPSes against self-hosted models, then in the hybrid setup most of this site recommends: a cheap always-on VPS as the front door, a local model at home for the heavy inference. Hermes Agent joined in spring. I am a paying customer at Contabo and DigitalOcean, on my own card, and I have used Hetzner for other projects for years.
This site started as the notes I wished existed when I was choosing where to put an agent. Everything on it is written by me, from that experience. No ghostwriters, no content farm.
How we test
- The rule for every provider in the comparison: an agent running on it, on the plan we name, for at least a month, paid with our own money. Contabo and DigitalOcean meet that today. Hetzner I have run for years, though not yet a full month with an agent on the exact plan named; that box is up now. Hostinger and Cloudways are on the bench; their guides go up when their month completes. Until then their rows carry published specs and prices.
- We record what we actually measure: renewal price on the invoice, RAM under load, whether the one-click install worked first time, what the panel is like at 11pm.
- We do not publish benchmark numbers because they move month to month on shared hosts. We publish the stable conclusions in words.
- Prices are checked against the provider's own pages on the date shown on each page. If one moved, tell me and it gets fixed, with credit.
How we are paid
Four providers in the comparison pay a commission if you sign up through our link: Contabo, Hostinger, DigitalOcean and Cloudways. Links to them carry an affiliate tag and rel="sponsored". You pay the same price either way.
Two providers pay nothing: Hetzner and Oracle Cloud. Hetzner is our top recommendation for developers. We link to it anyway, without a referral code, because it is the right answer for a lot of readers and being right matters more than being paid.
The chooser scores providers on your answers. There is no term in the scoring for what a provider pays us. If that ever changes, this page will say so.
What we will not do
- Show introductory prices as if they were the price. Every price on this site is the renewal price, with the intro noted.
- Rank by commission.
- Publish a guide for a provider we have not run an agent on. The comparison table lists published specs; the guides only exist after a real month.
- Accept payment for placement.
Contact
hello@alternmedia.nl. Corrections welcome; we credit them. Elsewhere: LinkedIn, GitHub.