Guidelines for Reviewers

2. The essentials

• You must be at least 18 years old and have a RankRack account to submit a review.
• Your review must describe a real, first-hand and reasonably recent experience.
• Your rating and written comments should reflect your honest opinion.
• Fake, purchased, coordinated or manipulated reviews are prohibited.
• Reviews must not be submitted in return for a reward or other benefit.
• Employees, owners, close associates and competitors must not review a provider where their connection could affect impartiality.
• Keep your contribution relevant, respectful and safe for a public audience.
• Do not publish passwords, IP addresses, login credentials, payment details or other sensitive information.
• RankRack may ask for evidence to confirm that an experience is genuine.
• Providers may respond to and report reviews, but they cannot pay RankRack to remove criticism or improve their rating.

3. Who may write a review

You may review a provider when you have personally used, purchased or meaningfully interacted with its service. This could include:

• renting a game server, web-hosting plan, VPS/VDS, dedicated server or cloud service;
• receiving pre-sales advice or technical support;
• going through setup, migration, cancellation or a refund process;
• experiencing an outage, performance problem, security incident or billing dispute connected to your service; or
• using a service through an organisation where you were directly responsible for managing or supporting it.

Browsing a provider's website, hearing about somebody else's experience or disagreeing with its public opinions is not enough by itself.

Reviews should normally be based on recent experiences so they fairly represent how the provider currently operates. If you describe an older experience, make the date or period clear.

4. Reviews must be first-hand

Write only about what you personally experienced. Do not repeat rumours, copy another person's allegations or present assumptions as facts.

If you manage hosting on behalf of a business, community or client, you may describe what you directly observed in that role. Do not reveal confidential information belonging to that organisation or its users.

You must not review a provider if you:

• own, work for or represent that provider;
• are a close family member or household member of someone with a significant interest in it;
• own, work for or represent a competing provider;
• are being paid to influence the provider's reputation; or
• have another undisclosed relationship that creates a serious conflict of interest.

Providers and their representatives should use their official profile and response tools rather than posing as customers.

5. No incentives or review manipulation

A provider may invite customers to leave honest feedback, but the invitation must not dictate the rating, wording or outcome.

Do not submit, change or remove a review in exchange for:

• money, account credit or a refund;
• discounts, upgrades or free service time;
• giveaway or prize-draw entry;
• priority support or preferential treatment; or
• any other reward or threatened disadvantage.

A provider may resolve a complaint after a review is posted. You may update your review voluntarily to reflect what happened, but the provider must not make support, refunds or other rights conditional on changing or deleting it.

Buying, selling, arranging or coordinating reviews is prohibited. This includes review exchanges, organised attacks, mass submissions, multiple accounts and asking people without genuine experience to influence a provider's score.

6. Write a useful hosting review

A strong RankRack review explains what was purchased, what happened and why that experience led to the chosen rating. Where relevant, consider including:

• the type of service and general plan tier;
• the approximate period of use;
• the region or server location;
• setup and provisioning time;
• reliability, uptime and outage handling;
• latency, performance and resource consistency;
• control-panel or management experience;
• DDoS protection or incident response you directly experienced;
• support response, communication and resolution;
• pricing, renewals, billing and cancellation; and
• whether the issue was ultimately resolved.

Only include details that genuinely affected your experience. Do not publish an IP address, hostname, customer ID, ticket transcript, licence key, API key, login, payment information or security configuration.

Technical claims should be accurate and properly framed. For example, distinguish between a single connection problem and a confirmed provider-wide outage. If you quote uptime, latency, packet loss or benchmark figures, explain the relevant timeframe, location or testing conditions where practical. Do not claim a provider caused an incident unless you have a reasonable basis for doing so.

7. Be honest, specific and fair

Your star rating is your opinion, but statements presented as fact should be truthful and supported by your experience. Describe events clearly and avoid exaggeration.

You may criticise a provider strongly, compare it with another service or explain why you would not use it again. However, the review must remain focused on the relevant service experience and must not become a campaign against the business or an individual.

Try to separate fact from opinion. For example, state what response time you experienced instead of claiming that a provider "never helps anyone." A disagreement with a provider does not automatically mean either party has broken RankRack's rules.

8. One experience, one genuine account

Use one personal RankRack account. Do not create additional accounts to repeat a review, bypass restrictions or influence ratings.

You may update a review if circumstances change, such as when an issue is resolved. You may submit another review following a genuinely separate experience where RankRack provides that option, but repeated posts about the same event may be combined, limited or removed.

Do not repeatedly delete and repost substantially the same content to regain visibility.

9. Prohibited content

Reviews and reviewer profiles must not contain:

• threats, encouragement of violence or instructions for harmful activity;
• hate speech or degrading attacks based on protected or personal characteristics;
• harassment, targeted abuse or excessive profanity;
• sexually explicit, graphic or otherwise seriously disturbing material;
• content that promotes illegal activity, fraud, malware, credential theft or attacks on systems;
• knowingly false accusations or statements that unlawfully damage a person's or business's reputation;
• impersonation or misleading claims about your identity or relationship to a provider;
• spam, irrelevant links, referral codes, affiliate promotions or advertisements;
• copied reviews or content to which you do not have the necessary rights; or
• attempts to manipulate RankRack's ratings, moderation or reporting systems.

Mentioning another provider for a relevant comparison is allowed. Turning a review into an advert for that provider is not.

10. Personal, confidential and security-sensitive information

Reviews are public. Protect your own information and the information of others.

Do not publish:

• private names or contact details of support agents or other customers;
• home addresses, personal telephone numbers or private email addresses;
• order references, invoices containing personal data or payment details;
• account credentials, authentication tokens or recovery information;
• unredacted support tickets or private messages;
• customer databases, logs containing personal data or confidential business records;
• server IP addresses or configurations where disclosure could create a security risk; or
• allegations about an identifiable person's private life.

You may describe how a provider's staff handled your case without naming an individual. Publicly available business contact information may be referenced when genuinely necessary, but should not be posted for harassment or unwanted contact.

If you provide evidence privately to RankRack, we will handle it according to our Privacy Policy and moderation processes. Do not place sensitive evidence in the public review itself.

11. Evidence and verification

RankRack may ask you to confirm that your experience is genuine. Useful evidence can include a redacted invoice, order confirmation, service dashboard screenshot, cancellation confirmation, relevant support correspondence or other records connecting you to the experience.

Evidence should be genuine and unaltered apart from reasonable redaction of sensitive information. Fabricated, misleading or manipulated evidence may lead to removal of the review and restrictions on your account.

Not every review will require evidence. A request for evidence does not mean RankRack has decided that a reviewer is dishonest, and a provider's report does not guarantee removal. If sufficient information is not provided when reasonably requested, RankRack may restrict or remove the review because it cannot be validated.

12. Provider responses and requests for information

A claimed provider may publicly respond to a review or request enough information to identify the relevant customer experience. You are not required to debate the provider publicly.

If you choose to share information, use the private method provided by RankRack and disclose only what is reasonably necessary. RankRack may also contact you independently during an investigation.

A provider may explain its position, challenge inaccuracies or state that it cannot identify the transaction. This does not automatically invalidate your review. Equally, reviewers must not use a review to threaten a provider into giving a refund, credit or other outcome to which they are not entitled.

13. Reporting content

Reviewers and providers may report content they reasonably believe breaches these guidelines. Reports should identify the relevant rule and include supporting information where available.

Do not misuse reporting tools to silence criticism, target another user, overwhelm the moderation team or repeatedly report content after a decision without new information.

RankRack assesses reports impartially. Content will not be removed merely because it is negative, embarrassing, disputed or written about a paying provider.

14. How RankRack moderates reviews

RankRack may use automated checks, account and behavioural signals, community reports, supporting evidence and human review to identify suspicious or prohibited activity.

Depending on the circumstances, we may:

• ask the reviewer or provider for more information;
• temporarily limit the visibility of content while a serious issue is assessed;
• edit formatting or redact exposed personal or security-sensitive information where appropriate;
• remove content that breaches these guidelines or the law;
• restrict review, reporting or account features;
• suspend or close accounts involved in serious or repeated misuse; or
• preserve and disclose information where legally required.

Moderation decisions are based on the available information and the applicable rules. RankRack does not decide contractual disputes, award compensation or act as a court. Where accounts conflict and neither version can be established, we may allow clearly expressed opinion while taking action against unsupported harmful claims or other rule breaches.

15. Updating, deleting and appealing

You may update your review when your experience develops or a provider resolves the issue. Make clear what changed so readers can understand the full history. Where account controls permit it, you may also delete your own review.

If RankRack takes action on your review or account, we may explain the reason and provide a way to submit further information or request another assessment. An appeal should explain why the decision may be wrong and include any relevant evidence. Repeating the same request without new information may not result in another review.

16. Reporting pressure or abuse by a provider

Tell RankRack if a provider or its representative:

• offers a reward for a positive review or for removing criticism;
• threatens you because of an honest review;
• asks you to submit a review that does not reflect your experience;
• encourages staff, associates or non-customers to post reviews;
• selectively invites only customers expected to leave favourable feedback while deliberately excluding others in a misleading way; or
• attempts to obtain sensitive information beyond what is reasonably needed to identify your experience.

Include relevant evidence where it is safe and lawful to do so.

17. Changes to these guidelines

RankRack may update these guidelines as the platform, its features and applicable legal requirements develop. The version in force when content is assessed will guide our decision, unless the law requires otherwise.

Where these guidelines do not address a situation directly, RankRack will interpret them in a way that protects authentic feedback, user safety, provider fairness and the integrity of the platform.

18. Contacting RankRack

If you need help with a review, want to report misuse or wish to challenge a moderation decision, contact RankRack through the official support channel listed on our website or Discord server. Do not post confidential evidence in a public channel.