Yigber’s Online Adventures

Any one who wants to put up a web site of any size, and have at least some control over it, has to buy a web hosting account. There’s a huge number of companies offering this service with about ten of them being the most leading and prominent in the biz.

So when you want to get your space it is natural to first try and google up information on the companies you like. I tried that and was swamped with tons of information and reviews and coupons everywhere.

After spending a few long minutes reading those reviews, these are my conclusions.

• It’s easy to annoy a web hosting customer. For that reason ALL the companies have bad things written on them. This doesn’t mean that they are all bad. There’s no choice but to look at overall long term reputation and to read into the negative reviews to see if it’s just a case of someone getting offended by a sleepy support-person or whether it’s a more serious claim.
• Focus on the negative talk. It’s funny to note that review sites that are affiliated with a web hosting company will never include any bad reviews on any other company at all. And vice versa: If a page contained negative slander on a company, then there’s a good chance (about 100%) that this site is not affiliated with anyone. This means that reviews by affiliates are bias and worthless, while slanderous posts are much more trustworthy.
• 99.9% of the review sites you will stumble upon are bias. Practically ALL of the web sites out there that are dedicated to providing reviews on hosting packages are bias and partial towards the company that pays most in referral commission. Take that into account.
• Look at hints for bias in review sites’ domain name. Avoid review sites that have the words “reviews”, “top”, “top10″, “best”, “official”, “review”, “coupons” etc along with the name of a specific host or with the actual word “hosting”. For example: web-hosting-reviews.com, top10-hosting.com, bluehostreviews etc. They are usually tailored reviews and are most probably a complete waste of your clicks and bandwidth.
• Look at hints for bias in the links pointing out. Avoid sites which do not contain simple links such as www.HOSTNAME.com. If you see www.HOSTNAME.com/track/?xyz-whatever and such, than there’s a good chance this link is an affiliation link and if you use it to buy a hosting package than the owner of that link gets a referral commission. This is generally ok, but when you mix opinions and marketing you usually get an undesired result.

---

BTW, did we mention that our favorite hosting company and the hoster of this blog is BlueHost (aff link) ?