Nearly a year ago, the newest site in the LowEnd family launched: ServerVerify!  This site is the largest collection of YABS (Yet Another Benchmark Script) benchmarks on the planet, with over 10,000 user-submitted reports in its database.  This project had been a dream of LowEnd owner Jon Biloh’s for quite a while and it’s been a huge success.  Let’s check in on how it’s going and what the future holds.

Hello, Jon!  Let’s start with what inspired ServerVerify? As I recall, this idea had been percolating for a long time.

It had. I have been in the hosting industry for 20 years, going back to founding ColoCrossing in 2006, and I have watched people struggle with the same basic purchasing problem for most of that time. It is very difficult to know how a server will actually perform before you buy it.

Providers can publish specifications, pricing, network information, and marketing claims, but those things do not always tell you what the real customer experience will be. A VPS can look excellent on paper and perform poorly in practice, while a smaller or lesser known provider can quietly deliver exceptional value.

LowEndTalk members have been sharing benchmarks and experiences for years, but much of that information was scattered across thousands of discussion threads. ServerVerify grew out of the idea that we could organize that data, standardize it, and make it genuinely useful to hosting shoppers.

Another major reason I launched ServerVerify was to encourage providers to elevate their game. The platform highlights both overperforming and underperforming providers using actual customer data. Good providers deserve recognition, especially when they are delivering excellent performance and value without having the largest marketing budget. At the same time, transparency gives every provider an incentive to improve.

Ultimately, I want ServerVerify to help create a better and more competitive hosting market.

ServerVerify launched last September, so it has been up and running for about 10 months. How has it been going?

We launched on September 15, 2025. The first version was very much a minimum viable product (which, for the record, was the result of 1 year of effort and wasn’t “vibe coded” … hah). [Indeed, we’ve covered a bit of the site creation lore in the past – raindog308].

It had its quirks, and it was nowhere near as complete as the platform is today. Still, I think it is fair to say that ServerVerify provided useful data to hosting shoppers from day one. It certainly does today.

The response from the community has been very encouraging. Traffic has grown significantly, with visitor counts continuing to rise from month to month. More importantly, people are actually using the platform. They are submitting benchmarks, reviewing providers, exploring the leaderboards, and suggesting ways to make the site better.

One thing I am especially proud of is how quickly we have taken requests from LowEndTalk members and turned them into working features. The original ServerVerify announcement thread has effectively become an ongoing public feedback channel. Someone suggests something, we discuss it, and if it makes sense, we often get it built and released very quickly. That close relationship with the community is one of the project’s greatest strengths.

ServerVerify gets better every week. I do not mean that as marketing language. We are literally making improvements, fixing issues, and releasing new functionality almost every week.

I think you’ve rolled out a new feature, or ten, during that time. How has the project grown since launch?

The platform has grown enormously from that first version. ServerVerify started primarily as a way to organize and compare benchmark results. Today it is developing into a much broader hosting research platform.

We now have advanced benchmark search and filtering, detailed provider profiles, customer reviews, hosting deals, provider claims, value rankings, recommendation data, performance trends, leaderboards, and an Insights section that turns the growing dataset into information people can actually use.

Some of the more notable recent additions include provider recommendation rates, a Most Recommended Hosts leaderboard, rank movement, performance trends on provider profiles, recommendation trends over time, country level location filtering, and FIO storage performance filtering in Advanced Search.

We have also made the value leaderboards more useful. For example, one very active and highly appreciated LowEndTalk member regularly submits updated benchmarks for a large number of servers. That was great for the database, but it sometimes meant that results from the same person and provider could take over an entire leaderboard. We adjusted the presentation so the tables remain useful and representative while still preserving all of that valuable benchmark data.

Other recent work includes a cleaner Advanced Search interface, benchmark and review reminder emails, better tools for identifying incomplete CPU benchmark data, improved provider backlink badges with real impression and click tracking, and continued improvements to moderation, data review, provider assignment, and quality control.

Many of these ideas came directly from LowEndTalk users. I really enjoy that part of the process. The community is not just using ServerVerify. It is actively helping shape what ServerVerify becomes.

There are 9,800 benchmarks as of this writing. Ten thousand is right around the corner, along with more than 1,600 reviews. Does that feel like critical mass, or is there another metric you’re looking for?

We have now crossed 10,000 benchmark results in the database, which is an exciting milestone. There are also more than 1,600 approved reviews.

Not every benchmark in the database is public. Every submission is reviewed by a human for data integrity and provider assignment accuracy because the quality of the information matters much more to me than simply displaying the largest possible number. If we cannot confidently associate a result with the correct provider, or if something about the submission does not look right, we would rather hold it back for further review than publish questionable data.

I do think the platform is reaching a meaningful level of scale. We now have enough information to identify trends, compare providers, surface strong values, and draw conclusions that would not have been possible with only a few hundred results.

That said, I do not view 10,000 benchmarks as the finish line. More current benchmarks, more reviews, broader provider coverage, and more geographic diversity will make the platform increasingly useful.

The test I keep coming back to is very simple: “Would I use this myself to make a hosting purchase decision?”

Today, the answer is yes. That is important to me. Each month, as the dataset grows and we add better ways to understand it, the answer becomes an even stronger yes.

Now that there is enough information to really dig into, the Insights page is especially interesting. Does any particular statistic jump out at you?

The biggest surprise for me is how satisfied customers generally are with their hosting providers.

Across the platform, the average recommendation rate among VPS and dedicated server users who submit benchmarks is above 80 percent. In other words, more than four out of five users say they would recommend their provider. I expected the number to be positive, but if you had asked me before we had the data, I probably would have guessed it would be a little lower.

People are often more motivated to speak up when something goes wrong, especially in an online hosting community. It is encouraging to see that most customers appear to be happy with the services they are buying.

I really like the Insights page because it begins to tell the story behind the raw benchmark numbers. Performance data is useful on its own, but it becomes much more meaningful when you can combine it with recommendation rates, provider trends, value scores, market share, locations, and changes over time.

As ServerVerify collects more information, I want to keep developing the Insights page and surfacing statistics that are interesting, useful, and sometimes unexpected. We are still in the early stages of understanding everything this dataset can tell us.

What’s on the roadmap for ServerVerify going forward?

One of the next major additions is a provider comparison tool. Users will be able to select multiple hosting providers and compare their benchmark performance, recommendation rates, reviews, locations, features, and other important data side by side. I think that will be one of the most directly useful purchasing tools we have built.

We are also planning to surface more performance data throughout the site, including adding meaningful statistics to the similar provider tables and leaderboard areas. The goal is to help users understand not only which providers are listed, but why they may be worth considering.

Longer term, the roadmap includes a native ServerVerify benchmark script, expanded GPU benchmarking and search support, and preparation for Geekbench 7. A native script would give us more control over the testing process, allow us to collect a broader and more consistent set of data, and reduce our dependence on any one outside benchmark source.

The Insights section will continue to be a major focus. I want to add more historical comparisons, performance trends, recommendation trends, and ways to identify providers that are improving or slipping over time. As the dataset becomes larger and more mature, the analytical side of ServerVerify becomes increasingly valuable.

There are also many less visible improvements on the roadmap involving data quality, moderation, error handling, provider information, and internal tools. Those may not be the features that receive the biggest announcements, but they are essential to maintaining trust in the platform.

More broadly, the roadmap is guided by the community. We have a clear vision for where ServerVerify is going, but some of the best improvements have come from people using the site and telling us what would make it more valuable.

I love working on ServerVerify, LowEndBox, and LowEndTalk. It is a genuine passion for me, just as the hosting industry itself has been a passion throughout the 20 years since I founded ColoCrossing in 2006. ServerVerify gives me an opportunity to take what I have learned during that time and build something that helps customers make better decisions, recognizes providers doing excellent work, and hopefully pushes the entire industry forward.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.