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.
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