Web site Hosting - beware website reviews

I started looking for reliable web site hosting about 2 years ago and learned a costly lesson. I want you to know what went wrong so that you can avoid the same trap.

Like most webmasters, I created a list of things I thought were of importance when selecting a company to host my web applications. I chose to prioritize around performance and reliability and if I were to select a provider today, I would still choose these attributes but would look out for more. Let me explain...

Naturally I thought I would find the most suitable web hosting solution by searching on Google for reviews. This worked! I cam across many great reviews and found a few really performing well in many. In fact, two or three consistently rated highest. I thought I was on to a winner. Then I discovered something disturbing.

Some of the web hosting companies create their own websites to review web hosting providers and then, as you might suspect, rank their own services very highly. The more review websites they create the more prevalent their own services seem to rate. To the unsuspecting shopper, this can be disastrous. You may well end up selecting a company that does not perform relatively well at all but worse than that, you now have your important information being managed by people of dubious behaviour. So how do you get around this?

I found that the best way to find a web host is to look for user reviews. These have proven to be the most reliable. Try some of the bloggs as well. You can get some great information on those web sites. There is nothing like reading about the experiences of real users to get a good insight into the quality of the service.

Finally, when you have been using the services of a web hosting company for some time, give back to the community by rating your service provider on some of these websites.

Beware when selecting a web hosting provider - not all is as it seems! I would select my provider from user reviews and would rate customer service as high as performance, reliability and cost.

Pete Fick

Web Site Hosting

Webwings Internet Marketing