Web Hosting Reviews – Don’t Get Scammed!

Web hosting review sites are one way of choosing a host, to see what other people think before housing your entire business website with a bad hosting provider. Unfortunately, many of these sites are fronts for the providers themselves, are loaded with shill reviews, or list only the hosts that pay the review site owner the highest commissions. You may want to take this into account before trusting them.

Several hosts are in the slimy business of creating “web hosting review” sites that look real, and may even have some real reviews and possibly even allow users to submit reviews, but of course skew all the results so they come up at the top and their direct competitors are near the bottom.

Secondly, and related to the first problem, even if the review site isn’t actually owned by any hosting company it can be quickly overrun by phony reviews from employees of the hosting companies. And the bad hosts are more motivated to do this as they may have a bad reputation elsewhere on the web. This is quite common on Amazon.com, with authors’ friends creating fake accounts and reviewing just the one book, giving it five stars.

Also, several sites that offer “web hosting reviews” are dishonestly set up so the host that pays the highest commission to the site owner is also rated the highest, and is most prominent in all lists as “best host.” Genuine review sites should also include hosts that do not pay commission, or pay little.

Keep these caveats in mind when searching for web hosting reviews, or potentially end up with a poor quality hosting provider that gives you endless headaches when you attempt to house your website with them. One way to avoid these problems is to seek out user comments on forums and blogs instead of looking for actual named “reviews.” You can often find many people complaining about or praising web hosts like this that don’t ever mention they are actually “reviewing” a site.