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What's the difference between lab-hosted and self-hosted (third-party vs vendor) testing?

A COA is only as credible as the party that can confirm it, so where the results live matters more than how official the PDF looks. Lab-hosted results are viewable on the testing lab's own site, where the lab itself stands behind them — the strongest public signal a buyer can get without commissioning their own test. Self-hosted results name a real third-party lab but the documents live on the vendor's own site: plausibly genuine, but not something the lab confirms for you. Unattributed COA-style documents name no testing lab and are the weakest published tier. Two further states are recorded but earn no third-party pass: account-required, where a vendor has a COA page behind a sign-in that neither pepmg nor a prospective buyer can read from outside, and lab-named-only, where a real testing lab is named but no certificate could be opened anywhere public. Neither is treated as an absence of testing — pepmg reports what it could observe, and being unable to see a document is not evidence that none exists.

These are exactly the tiers pepmg detects automatically and folds into a vendor's transparency score. Ranking stays $/mg only — a COA can lift a vendor's trust score and badges, never its price rank. pepmg does not run the labs, test the material, or certify purity; it classifies how verifiable the published evidence is.

From: The COA guide

All help topics · Answers restate pepmg's own pages; the linked section is the authority.

All products listed are sold by third-party vendors for laboratory and research use only (RUO). Where an FDA label or a peer-reviewed study has published a dose, pepmg reports it with the source named, because that is safer than guessing. It is a report, not medical advice and not a recommendation to use anything. pepmg sells nothing and ships nothing. Listings are price-tracking data, not endorsements.