Initially, we started off with static data together with a management panel for hosts to add/edit/delete their offers. As you might have guessed, most providers didn't feel like doing this, and those that did made mistakes entering the data or didn't keep it up to date.
This is why we've put most of our effort into automating the data feeds and getting up to date information. Right now, 60.3% of our offers are automatically retrieved from the provider and kept up to date every 24 hours.
Whenever a provider adds, edits or deletes an offer from their website, it's automatically synced to our website accordingly. We also try to do this for stock, but some providers do not expose this information before ordering.
While I'll freely admit we still have mistakes on our website, I hope that it's still useful in finding the right server for your needs, and appreciate your patience while we keep working on improving it every day. :)
P.S: We have deployed some small scale machine learning and are experimenting with it as we go, but since our knowledge in this field is lacking, progress will be slow.
You'll see providers appear on lowendhosting, and similar sites, as a desperate bid to get more customers. Then they fold.
* The server providers do not give out machine-readable data.
* It's difficult to distinguish some details from specifications, such as vCPUs or dedicated cores.
* Promotions and discounts cannot be recognized programmatically.
* There's no reliable way to detect discontinued or withdrawn plans.
Ultimately, people will find the result of their search is either withdrawn or unusable for some reasons, and they still have to purchase the server from a well-known provider... And lurking at lowendtalk.com is still a better way to find a good deal.
Improving the quality of data sounds like a good machine-learning project.