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?"

Comments

A market for lemons

[DavidNWelton]

I have some suspicions that web hosting is a "market for lemons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemon s :

In this model, as quality is undistinguishable ex ante by the buyer (due to the asymmetry of information), incentives exist for the seller to pass off a low-quality good as a higher-quality one. The buyer, however, takes this incentive into consideration, and takes the quality of the good to be uncertain. Only the average quality of the good will be considered, which in turn will have the side effect that goods that are above average in terms of quality will be driven out of the market. This mechanism is repeated until a no-trade equilibrium is reached.

Other than by talking with friends (which isn't very scalable), it's hard to know who's good, and who is just some random loser thinking he's going to make a buck. It's really easy to put up a fancy site, even answer the phone professionally, but you only learn they're no good when your server dies on Friday evening and no one can fix it untill Monday!

Re:A market for lemons

[rimu guy]

It was great to read the 'market for lemons' post. It takes a fair bit of experience in the 'industry' to be able to pick the good hosts from the bad. And unless hosting customers are savvy enough to tell a good host apart from a bad one the good ones will indeed be driven out of the market.

Here is my advice for finding a good host.

• Ignore the 'review sites'. Or at least take them the reviews with a major grain of salt. Most 'review' sites are indeed just paid advertising sites. 'Top Hosts' are typically just the hosts that paid the most for the listing.
• Look for a host with a few years in the business. It means the host has gotten past the first 6 month hurdle were probably 99% of all webhosts just up and disappear (losing money, getting bored of the job, selling out to a bigger outfit, etc). Obviously a new business may be good, but you will improve your odds by picking an older business. In addition to proving themselves survivors they will likely have gotten their procedures and server setups nicely tuned, plus they will have a bit of experience behind them.
• Look for multiple contact details on their site. Phone, email, tickets. Most webhosts will work from home, so you may or not see a physical address (which isn't necessarily bad). A physical (office) address may indicate a larger organisation (which isn't necessarily good).
• Look for forums or some way of users making public comments/questions about a site. It indicates the host has some confidence in their ability. And it is likely you'll see problem reports (quite normal, no need to get alarmed) and how the host deals with them (which is what you should really be interested in). A lack of forums may not indicate a bad host (they could just be shy).
• Google for the prospective host. You'll find people recommending them, or hosted by them. You may find positive/negative comments about the host. As has been mentioned, research them on web hosting talk. Take any comments with a grain of salt: host enough people for long enough and _someone_ is going to be unhappy about how they were treated. Look for common themes in what people are saying about the host.
• If you have the time setup some kind of uptime monitoring on the host. Preferably try to figure out the server they are setting up new customers on. It may not be the same server as their domain.
• Pop in a pre-sales question. Ask a few intelligent questions. See what response you get. The response may be well written or may indicate the author is a l337 h4xor kid trying out the hosting biz. The response should indicate the host knows what they are talking about. Good questions to ask: what do you do about server failures? what network outages have you had? And describe your backup setup. Problems happen, denial could very well be an indication of dishonesty.
• Check their prices. Deals that are too good to be true probably are. Look for middle of the road and up pricing (and be aware that there are plenty of high priced hosts that have pretty bad reputations).
• Check their resource allocations. 'Unlimited' is bad (or rather it is not really possible despite what the host will say). 'Unmetered' is the more honest phrase (it typically mean, when applied to bandwidth that the server is on a fixed bandwidth pipe and you can use as much as you can get. When the bandwidth is maxed out your transfers will just be throttled.

--
Disclaimer: Take all this advice with a grain of salt, since I happen to run a VPS hosting outfit.

Re:Classic webhosting is passe... IMHO

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true if and only if you know how to run a server and want to screw with the maintainence (and security) of it.

If you do, VPS's are a great deal. $20/month can buy a nice little VPS (9GB space/ 96GB bandwidth) that can handle a few database driven sites, and email, and DNS quite nicely.

Right now, one of my favorites is unixshell.com. What I really like about them is that you get console access via SSH in addition to normal SSH access. This is great for when you accidentally screw up your firewall and lock yourself out of the server.

Beware WHT

[Bitsy Boffin]

As others have said, WHT is probably your best bet for reviews.

One thing to note about WHT though is that there is a "WHT Level Host" and that level is quite low - what I mean is that a lot of the time WHT attracts those $1/month overselling fly-by-night teenage (or less) managed "hosts" (who are almost certainly kids who bought a $1/month mammothly oversold reseller account) that will ignore support requests when they go on summer holidays with thier parents. Unfortunatly these hosts start out well, and they often get good reviews (probably tooting thier own horn), but very quickly they will die off.

Also make sure you know exactly what you want, ask questions. You're posting here so I'll assume that things like SSH access are important, and if you're using PHP you probably don't want anywhere that has safe_mode restrictions (and probably not open_basedir), you might also want to avoid hosts that run php as suPHP (basically cgi-mode php in a wrapper).

In short, take your time, choose wisely.