About
Somebody has to decide. It may as well be us.
AfterCompare exists because of one specific, maddening failure in how things get reviewed online: the comparison that refuses to conclude.
You search “X vs Y”. You find a page with a handsome table, ten green ticks, ten red crosses, and a closing paragraph explaining that the right choicedepends on your needs. You already knew it depended on your needs. That is why you were reading. The page has taken the only genuinely hard part of the job — the judgement — and handed it straight back to you, then collected a commission on whichever link you clicked out of fatigue.
The name is deliberately a little awkward. After you compare, something is supposed to happen: you decide. This site publishes that part.
What we actually do
One named winner per matchup, stated in a sentence you could repeat to a colleague without hedging. The full reasoning, so you can disagree with it on the merits rather than on vibes. The specific circumstances in which our own pick is the wrong one — because a recommendation with no boundary is an advertisement wearing a lab coat. And every factual claim linked to its source, with the date we checked it.
We are unusually interested in what a decision costs after the honeymoon. The renewal price rather than the promotional one. The per-sale platform fee rather than the monthly subscription. The vendor policy that changes once your data is already inside the box. That gap — between the price on the sticker and the cost over the life of the thing — is where most bad buying decisions are actually made, and closing it is the whole job.
What we don't do
We do not run a hardware lab, and we will never tell you we did. You will not find a fabricated benchmark on this site — no invented “we load-tested it at 500 concurrent users” — because a made-up number is worse than no number at all: it launders a guess into a fact. What we do instead is read the pricing pages, the fee schedules and the fair-usage clauses properly, work out what the thing really costs, and commit to an answer. The method page sets out exactly where our evidence comes from and where it stops.
Who runs it
AfterCompare is written and run by Ismail. It is an independent site rather than a media group: no anonymous “expert panel”, no rotating cast of freelancers paid by the word, just one person who builds and hosts small web projects, has spent real money on the buying end of hosting, platform and hardware decisions, and got tired of how badly those decisions are served by the pages that claim to help.
That is a smaller claim than most review sites make, and it is meant to be. A named individual who can be emailed and corrected is worth more than an institutional voice that cannot.
How we make money — and why you should be suspicious
Affiliate commissions. Some links here pay us if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you whatsoever.
That is a real conflict of interest, and we would rather point at it than have you discover it. As it stands today, every winner on this site is a product that pays us. Three verdicts, three commissionable picks. If that makes you narrow your eyes, good — it is exactly the right instinct, and a site that quietly hoped you would not notice would deserve the scepticism.
Our answer is not “trust us”. Our answer is the arithmetic and the sources at the bottom of every page. The Cloudways verdict rests on a single checkable fact: that Cloudways charges $11 a month for the same server DigitalOcean sells for $12. If that is wrong, the verdict collapses in public, in front of you. A bought verdict has to visibly stop following from its own published evidence — so we publish the evidence, and you get to watch for it.
Two things worth knowing, because they are the only real test of any of this.In Kinsta vs Cloudways we picked Cloudways — the cheaper product, and the one that pays us less. Kinsta is the highest commission on the site and it lost, because at three times the price it is the wrong buy for most people paying their own bill.
And we have already published a verdict, then reversed it. The first version of Hostinger vs Cloudways argued that Cloudways was cheaper once Hostinger's promotional term ended. That was true of the monthly rate and false of the money: totalled properly, Hostinger stays cheaper for 106 months. We were wrong, the page now says the opposite, and the arithmetic is printed on it so you can check us rather than trust us. A site that never visibly changes its mind is not being careful — it is not looking.
The rest is procedure. The winner is chosen before the commercial arrangement is looked at. No vendor sees a verdict before publication, and none can buy one. And when a product that pays us nothing is the right answer, it wins, and the page says plainly that we earn nothing from it. If that never once happens, stop believing us.
Corrections
Prices move, plans get restructured, vendors reverse policies. Every claim on this site carries the date we verified it, which means every claim can go stale — and a stale verdict here is a failure, not a technicality. If we have something wrong, we want to know.
We will correct it, update the date, and say what changed.