How the World’s Most Trusted Platform Sells You Out for a Kickback

It’s the most logical first step a new business owner can take. You’ve decided to build your website on WordPress. You go to WordPress.org—the official source, the nonprofit foundation, the very creators of the software—to see what they recommend.

And there it is. A small, curated list of “Recommended” hosts. At the top of that list, you see a familiar name: Bluehost.

You feel a sense of relief. This is the official endorsement. It’s a seal of approval from the most trusted name in the game. You click the link, pull out your credit card, and sign up for that irresistible $3.99/month deal.

Congratulations. You’ve just been conned.

That wasn’t a recommendation. It was an advertisement. You didn’t just follow expert advice; you clicked one of the most lucrative and cynically placed affiliate links on the internet.

This is the WordPress industry’s dirtiest secret. The “official recommendation” from WordPress.org isn’t a meritocracy. It’s not a list of the best, fastest, or most secure hosts. It’s a pay-to-play racket, a list of companies who pay the biggest affiliate commissions. And by trusting it, you’ve been funneled directly into the jaws of the very companies that will make your life a living hell.

The Anatomy of a Betrayal

Let’s be brutally clear about what is happening. When you click that “recommendation” link, WordPress.org gets a kickback. A big one. Affiliate programs like Bluehost’s pay a one-time commission of $65, $100, or even $130 per sale.

This isn’t just a friendly tip; it’s a multi-million dollar revenue stream. And it creates a conflict of interest so profound it borders on corruption.

WordPress.org has zero financial incentive to recommend the best host. They have a massive incentive to recommend the host that pays them the most and converts the best. The result is a system that rewards hosts with the biggest marketing budgets and the most aggressive sales funnels, not the best technology or support.

This system actively propels you toward the worst actors in the industry. It’s no coincidence that the most heavily promoted hosts, like Bluehost, are almost all owned by a single, monstrous holding company called Newfold Digital (formerly EIG). This conglomerate is infamous for one thing: buying up good hosting companies, gutting their support, overloading their servers, and routing all their customers through a centralized, low-cost, and utterly useless support system.

The Hell You Paid For

You clicked the link. You bought the lie. Here is what you get for your trust:

• The Renewal Racket: That $3.99 price is a 12 or 36-month introductory trap. When it’s time to renew, that price explodes. Users report their $65 first-year bill jumping to over $300. That $45 bill becomes $200. It’s a 300-600% price hike, and they are betting you’re too entrenched to leave.
• The Performance Nightmare: Your site is slow. Painfully slow. Why? Because your site is crammed onto a single server with thousands of other sites, all fighting for the same limited resources. In independent tests, Bluehost’s uptime has been clocked as low as 96%—which translates to nine hours of downtime in a single incident.
• The Support Void: When your site goes down (and it will), you will discover the truth about their “24/7 Expert Support.” You will be met with chatbots, 45-minute wait times, and support agents who are clearly reading from a script and are incapable of doing anything but trying to upsell you. The Better Business Bureau gives you a clue, citing Bluehost’s “Failure to respond to 513 complaint(s)”.
• The Upsell Onslaught: From the moment you sign up, you are in a high-pressure sales funnel. They will try to sell you useless “security” add-ons, backup services that should be free, and “premium” email. Every problem you have becomes another opportunity for them to sell you a “solution.”

This isn’t a hosting plan. It’s a financial liability. And you were sent there by the one organization you thought you could trust.

We Don’t Pay for Endorsements. We Earn Them.

We don’t play this dirty game. Topsyde is not on that list, and we never will be.

Why? Because we’ve rejected this entire parasitic model. We don’t spend our money on kickbacks to WordPress.org. We spend it on your developer and our servers.

Our business model is the complete opposite of theirs.

• The affiliate model profits from churn and burn. They pay a huge commission upfront, lock you into a predatory contract, and don’t care if you leave in a year, because they’ve already gotten their money.
• Our model profits from retention. We don’t have a 600% renewal hike. We don’t have intro pricing. We have one flat, honest price. The only way we stay in business is by providing a service so undeniably valuable that you want to stay.

We’re not a “hosting company” in the traditional sense. We are your outsourced technical partner. You don’t get a link to a FAQ when your site breaks; you get a developer who logs in and fixes it. You don’t get a generic caching plugin; you get an expert who hand-optimizes your code for actual speed.

Stop looking for the “official” seal of approval. It’s for sale. It’s meaningless.

Start looking for a partner. Look for a team whose business model is aligned with your success, not one that sees you as a commission check. Stop trusting the recommendation and start trusting the results.