Slashdot Mirror
Finding Trustworthy Webhosting Reviews?
Nylisk asks: "I've been searching for a new webhost for my site and upcoming sites. While searching for a host I find many webhost review sites that feel fake. They are primitive and limit themselves to a small amount of hosts to examine. They will display any where to around 30 hosts to 'review' but mostly I find sites that review only 5 or 6 hosts. When you look further you find no community on the site to provide further comment on those reviews. The site is done by a single publisher with minimal information, and most of it looks like an advertisement. There are only email links and basic submissions boxes. I was going to post example links, but why give them the publicity?
The more I snoop, the more webhosts I find that are connected. I can't say I am surprised, but to be honest its tough not to find these results from search engines. I can't seem to find anything real. Are there any websites run by a community of members who review webhosts?"
You might want to check out Webhosting Talk and ask about any hosts you are looking at, or search the forums to see what customers of the hosts are saying.
I was going to post example links, but why give them the publicity?
So that they get to experience the wonders of the slashdot effect?
he more I snoop, the more webhosts I find that are connected.
Yes, many webhosts are just resellers of services that they acquire from other hosting companies. Actually, many different businesses have deals like this, it is not just limited to webhosts.
Are there any websites run by a community of members who review webhosts?
There are quite a few, but they all have either too few users that they are just as bad as a single user's review, or they have so many that there are an equal number of bad and good reviews of most hosts.
Personally, I would just ask friends and local IT people how they like their providers, and what they have and what they are missing.
Video Production Support
..on Web Hosting Talk for a few weeks and it becomes obvious who the good ones are. It takes a little work, but I can think of 5 hosts right off the top of my head that have sterling reputations and aren't hard to locate.
http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ Read the FAQ for details, but the gist of it is dirt-cheap prices and enourmous flexebility.
I signed up with Dreamhost a little while back, and they are pretty good. The tech support response time is a little high, but other than that it's been fine. The main reason I used them was their price. During a promotion, I got 2.4GB with 120GB bandwidth and lots of scripting support for $44 per year.
-William Brendel
If you're searching for a hosting provider, Netcraft has a rather nice table that displays server uptimes, % failed requests & other ancillary information for a large sample of hosting companies. An example of one row in the aforementioned table would be as follows:
Hosting provider = www.valueweb.net
OS = Linux
Outage hh:mm:ss = 0:00:00
Failed Req% = 0.00
DNS (Time taken for the DNS lookup of the hostname) = 0.181
Connect (first phase of the http GET request when the TCP/IP connection is setup to the remote server) = 0.105
First byte (time from when the last byte of the http GET request is sent until the first byte of the response header is received) = 0.211
Total (This is the time from when the http GET request is started until the last byte of data is received) = 0.211
Kb/s = -
Size (K) = 0
The table displays the top 50 hosting providers with respect to failed requests, so, personally, I restricted my search to all the hosting providers that had a Linux OS (for script compatibility), and a failed request percentage below 3.0%. Given these performance constraints, I subsequently chose the cheapest suitable plan offered by a hosting company in this sample set, based on my bandwidth/disk space criteria.
Wow, nice job ripping your customers off! This is yet another reason why I have never trusted a "web dev" to tell me where to host my sites. $29.95 setup fee and $15.00/month for 25MB of space and 5GB transfer/month?! That's not even competitive with my old crappy dialup ISP's plan! And the last time I used them was.... 1998.
Let me give you an example of some other hosting companies' offerings. For $9.95/month dreamhost offers 2400MB of space, 120GB transfer/month, unlimited mysql, and a boatload of features your isoc site doesn't.
Powweb only offers one package. I've used them for the last 5 years, and the price hasn't changed, simply the package. Currently it is 5,000MB of space, 10GB/DAY of transfer (about 300GB/month), 650 mail boxes (unlimited aliases), and a ton of features that blow a lot of providers out of the water. All I really want is shell access, but it's no big deal because this is for a corporate site, not for me to have my own slash code sitting online somewhere.
Why refer your customers to a web hosting company if you don't even know of any review sites? That seems pretty ridiculous to me. Why don't you just tell them that you don't have any clue about it.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling