Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Web Hosting Reviews - Can You Trust Them?


The market is filled with web hosting services providers of all shapes and sizes. In this jungle of hosting companies, how do you make a good choice? Should you trust the sites offering web hosting reviews?

Imagine doing a search on Google for "web hosting company", and coming up with around 1,700,000 hits! How can you possibly find the best web hosting plan for your needs among all those? You may look at the prices, thinking: "I will get a good deal by looking for the cheapest web hosting plan".

Well, not a good idea IMHO. Because of the fierce competition between providers of web hosting services, they often try to cut costs by cutting down on support, and also by vastly overselling hardware and bandwidth resources. The result: poor support and poor reliability. Simply put: your website goes down, and nobody listens to you when you try to tell your hosting company about it.

What you want and need is not a cheap web hosting plan, but a good web hosting plan that fits your budget. Having realized this, you start looking around for advice on good web hosting. Now, chances are you will then stumble upon some web hosting review site, which is happy to tell you that xyz.com is the very best web hosting provider in the world! Fine, you think, now my problem is solved thanks to that piece of valuable information.

Wrong again - most likely. The truth is, that many web hosting companies pay very generous commissions to those who refer new customers to them. It then becomes very tempting to set up a "web hosting reviews" website which is actually nothing but a billboard for the best-paying web hosting services providers, with no regard for their actual merits. And so it goes. I have personally looked over about a hundred of those web hosting reviews' sites, and in most cases they are just that - billboards. Often, they strongly recommend web hosting companies that are actually known to have a very poor customer reputation. Thus, they are really spreading misinformation and confusion instead of offering good advice.

The only reliable way of telling if a web hosting company is worth doing business with, is to see what their customers are saying about it. Such customer posts can be found here and there on various web sites, but you have to know where to look. A few of those web hosting reviews' sites does actually collect and post such customer opinions; and you can also find authentic posts by searching on large web hosting forums such as WebHostingTalk.

Needless to say, you should NOT bother with the "customer opinions" posted by the web hosting companies themselves on their own sites. Often, those "reviews" are fabricated, or simply copied from somewhere else.


by: Kai Virihaur

6 comments:

Unknown said...

No need to trust them just take an idea and rely on your own effort for choosing the best web hosting provider to hook up your internet plans.
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Unknown said...

I agree with you Robin because their are so may out their who just run an affiliate program to refer us to web hosting companies and earn money through clicks. Anyways I trust webhostingrating.com non other then this.
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Anonymous said...

If your services and prices are affordable means quickly you achieved your brand name. Its main reason for success your business.website hosting

Anonymous said...

Reviews are the best source to gather information about web hosting providers.web hosting provider

Unknown said...

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johan32 said...

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