Web Hosting Reviews – The Scam You Should Be Aware Of

When browsing the web for reviews of hosting providers, you’ll find many sites offering starred reviews, similar to what you see on Amazon.com, often arrange by “best” on top. There are a few problems with these review sites, however, and you may want to consider these before entrusting your business website with what may be a poor quality host.

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.

A few review sites are set up like Amazon.com, allowing five-star reviews from actual users. This can certainly be useful, but it is also too open to abuse from less scrupulous web hosting companies. Some of them are in the habit of flooding these sites with reviews of themselves, creating so many fake five-star reviews that they end up as the “best reviewed site,” even though they are no such thing.

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.