Web Hosting Reviews - Can You Trust Them?
By Kai Virihaur
The market is filled with web hosting services providers of allshapes and sizes. In this jungle of hosting companies, how doyou make a good choice? Should you trust the
sites offering webhosting reviews?
Imagine doing a search on Google for "web hosting company", andcoming up with around 1,700,000 hits! How can you possibly findthe best web hosting plan for your
needs among all those? Youmay look at the prices, thinking: "I will get a good deal bylooking for the cheapest web hosting plan".
Well, not a good idea IMHO. Because of the fierce competitionbetween providers of web hosting services, they often try to cutcosts by cutting down on support, and also
by vastly oversellinghardware and bandwidth resources. The result: poor support andpoor reliability. Simply put: your website goes down, and nobodylistens to you
when you try to tell your hosting company aboutit.
What you want and need is not a cheap web hosting plan, but agood web hosting plan that fits your budget. Having realizedthis, you start looking around for advice on
good web hosting.Now, chances are you will then stumble upon some web hostingreview site, which is happy to tell you that xyz.com is the verybest web hosting
provider in the world! Fine, you think, now myproblem is solved thanks to that piece of valuable information.
Wrong again - most likely. The truth is, that many web hostingcompanies pay very generous commissions to those who refer newcustomers to them.
It then becomes very tempting to set up a"web hosting reviews" website which is actually nothing but abillboard for the best-paying web hosting services providers,with
no regard for their actual merits. And so it goes. I havepersonally looked over about a hundred of those web hostingreviews' sites, and in most cases they are just that -
billboards. Often, they strongly recommend web hosting companiesthat are actually known to have a very poor customer reputation.Thus, they are really spreading
misinformation and confusioninstead of offering good advice.
The only reliable way of telling if a web hosting company isworth doing business with, is to see what their customers aresaying about it. Such customer posts can be found
here and thereon various web sites, but you have to know where to look. A fewof those web hosting reviews' sites does actually collect andpost such customer opinions;
and you can also find authenticposts by searching on large web hosting forums such asWebHostingTalk.
Needless to say, you should NOT bother with the "customeropinions" posted by the web hosting companies themselves ontheir own sites. Often, those "reviews" are
fabricated, orsimply copied from somewhere else.
About the author:I am a researcher, an artist, and a web developer. On mywebsite, www.TheHostingFinder.com, I offer some information on the good type of web hosts
- thekind that has a majority of happy and satisfied customers. Ihope these web hostingreviews may prove helpful to some people.
