In 2025, picking a hosting provider or a dedicated gaming server is almost never a shot in the dark. In the United States, people cross-check Google reviews, read expert comparisons, dig through forums, and watch videos before signing up for a monthly plan in dollars.

It is not a small detail. Surveys show that about 47% of consumers always read online reviews, and another 32% do so frequently before buying any service. At the same time, trust in that whole ecosystem is sliding. One survey focused on the U.S. market indicates that, in 2025, only 42% of consumers still trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, compared with 79% in 2020.

The explosion of AI-generated content and the spread of paid reviews turned what should be a shortcut for trust into yet another source of skepticism. That is exactly the backdrop for the Federal Trade Commission’s new rule on the use of consumer reviews and testimonials.

It was approved in August 2024 and has been in force since October 21, 2024. It is not just another generic guidance document; it is a formal regulation, with its own citation (16 CFR Part 465) and the ability to trigger civil penalties at the federal level.

For sites that compare digital services like hosting providers and gaming servers, this shift is anything but minor. Roundups that used to be treated purely as editorial choices are now squarely on the regulatory radar, especially when they influence decisions by an American audience that is already more skeptical about what it reads online.

The New FTC Rule: From Recommendation Issue To Compliance Issue

The FTC announced the Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials on August 14, 2024, in an official release that described fake reviews as something that wastes consumers’ time and money and distorts the marketplace. The final version of the rule was published in the Federal Register in August 2024 and took effect 60 days later.

The agency took years of isolated enforcement actions involving fraudulent reviews and folded them into a single, targeted regulation. The idea is straightforward. If reviews and testimonials have become one of the main inputs for consumer decisions in the U.S., gaming that system is now treated as a direct form of deceptive advertising.

The rule allows the agency to seek consumer redress and, in cases of knowing violations, to impose civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation, a reference figure cited in legal analyses published after the rule was adopted. And the discussion is not limited to general e-commerce.

Any sector that leans heavily on comparisons and “best of” lists is in scope, including complex digital services. Detailed guides, such as Escapist Magazine review of Bovada alternatives, which compares bonuses, payment methods, and user experience, now operate in an environment where the source of reviews, editorial independence, and transparency about incentives all have to be much clearer.

Those regulations apply to various comparisons, from the aforementioned online casinos and betting platforms to hosting rankings, “best VPS for game servers” lists, and reviews of cloud providers used by communities for Minecraft, Rust, Palworld, and many others.

What Exactly Does the FTC Now Ban In Reviews And Testimonials

The rule text, as published in the Federal Register, lays out a set of practices that are expressly deemed unfair or deceptive when they involve reviews or testimonials. The first is creating, selling, or buying fake reviews: posts from people who do not exist, from users who never actually used the service, or testimonials that materially misrepresent that experience.

That includes reviews written purely by AI and presented as if they were from real customers. The rule also targets buying reviews that are conditioned on sentiment. Encouraging someone to leave a review is not banned; what becomes a problem is offering benefits only if the review is positive (five stars, specific praise) or, on the flip side, incentivizing negative reviews to damage a competitor.

What the FTC wants to shut down is pay-to-rate tied to a specific outcome, not an open, transparent request that customers share their experience. Another focus is insider reviews. The rule prohibits executives, managers, employees, agents, and even close relatives from writing reviews that are presented as if they were from ordinary consumers, without a clear and prominent disclosure of their relationship to the company.

It also holds the business responsible when it highlights this kind of testimonial and knew or should have known it came from an insider. This point ties directly into the FTC’s long-standing Endorsement Guides, which stress the need to reveal material connections in recommendations.

The new rule also tackles two types of manipulation that often fly under the radar. The first is review sites controlled by a single company but presented as independent sources. If a hosting comparison site is owned, directly or indirectly, by one group of providers and markets itself as totally neutral, that ownership needs to be disclosed clearly to readers.

The second is selective suppression of reviews. Baseless legal threats, intimidation or hidden filters that scrub negative reviews while leaving positive ones intact, creating an artificially perfect storefront.

Lastly, the FTC is banning the sale and purchase of fake social proof: followers, views and likes generated by bots or hijacked accounts, whenever those metrics are used to inflate the commercial importance of a profile or business.

In sectors like hosting and game servers, where many decisions start precisely on YouTube, TikTok or Discord, this kind of manufactured social proof now carries real regulatory risk.

Why Hosting And Gaming Server Comparisons Are In The Crosshairs

The audience that lands on a site like MamboServer usually does not need a basic explanation of what a VPS is or why latency matters for a Rust server. What they want is clarity. Which providers were tested, with what configurations, how many Palworld slots were supported, how many months of uptime were measured, and how support teams handled real tickets.

As a result, user reviews and editorial comparisons naturally blend. A “best dedicated servers for Palworld” guide can combine lab data collected by the team with genuine impressions from players who rented machines for their persistent worlds.

Under the new rule, the FTC does not draw sharp lines around the origin of that content when it is used as a marketing tool. If a review is spotlighted on a page that encourages readers to sign up for a service and it is fake, bought or presented in a misleading way, it falls within the rule’s scope.

That creates some specific pressure points for hosting and gaming server comparisons aimed at a U.S. audience. If a site quietly filters out negative reviews from commercial partners while leaving positive ones untouched, it risks crossing into improper suppression of criticism.

If reviews written by employees of a hosting company are published as if they came from regular customers, with no disclosure, the trouble is twofold: lack of transparency and a direct rule violation. Then there is the question of editorial independence.

Comparison pages that present “Top 10 hosts for 2025” for the U.S. market but are fully controlled by a single brand need to be upfront about that. Otherwise, what looks like an impartial analysis can be treated as a company-controlled review website, a category the FTC calls out explicitly when describing banned practices.

Practical Impact For Review Sites Serving U.S. Audiences

For comparison and review sites with meaningful U.S. traffic, the new rule makes process overhauls almost unavoidable. The first step is internal. Editorial policies, testimonial collection flows, and review moderation criteria need to be documented and aligned with the FTC’s language.

That means spelling out, for example, in what situations a review can be removed (hate speech, spam, exposed personal data) and making it clear that a low rating or a critical comment is never, by itself, a valid reason for deletion. Another area is the relationship with marketing and SEO agencies.

The FTC has repeatedly said that companies can be held liable for the practices of third parties hired to manage reputation or optimize reviews. If an agency buys positive reviews in a client’s name, claiming total ignorance will not eliminate the risk.

For hosting and gaming server comparison sites that depend on affiliate partnerships, that calls for extra care in choosing partners.

The transparency piece also becomes more important, with affiliate disclosures that explain the platform earns commissions from some recommended providers but states that this does not override the impartial nature of the testing and analysis.

When these disclosures are clear and prominent, they help set expectations with readers and reduce the risk that a review or ranking will be seen as deceptive because of hidden financial ties. Finally, there is the technical side.

In a landscape where about 70% of consumers say they look for reviews to validate a company before buying, including on social media, the temptation to inflate numbers with bots and artificial metrics is strong.

But after the FTC rule, platforms that buy followers to look bigger, or that import fabricated testimonials just to pad out hosting plan landing pages, may be building an expensive regulatory liability instead of real credibility.