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

I'm a good one

[KodeK]

I'll host you from my home DSL connection :)

It is not reviews, but

[WTBF]

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.

Classic webhosting is passe... IMHO

[kosmosik]

I think classic webhosting is thing of a past. Recently I almost exclusively use dedicated servers or virtual servers. You can get one quite cheap like $20/mo. (3GB space/50GB transfer) - what you get is dedicated Linux machine (or vserver that looks and feels like dedicated machine) on which you install your distro of choice, get root on it and do whatever you wish. Also there are offers of hosting dedicated to several popular solutions - like Drupal, eZ Publish, Mambo, Zen Cart etc. - they specialize in those apps and you get installation of these with support etc. - I think that is better aproach than simply just to get an account on server and put files via FTP on it - I mean you got more in control.

I think this is the future. First of all take a look at linode.com - you will get your *own* server with full access to everything. No more waiting for ISP admin to fix that one httpd option or some permissions.

Check with friends

[tonsofpcs]

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.

Hang out..

[jvagner]

..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.

Hit web dev forums.

[SocialEngineer]

You can usually find a number of recommendations by freelancers such as myself for hosting suggestions.

A Small Orange is really popular right now among devs. I'm setting a client up with them, myself. They apparently have superb service and reliability. Another popular one is Dreamhost. I'll be switching over to them in 6-9 months, more than likely.

Re:Hit web dev forums.

[wbren]

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.

Try this

[Kraeloc]

http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ Read the FAQ for details, but the gist of it is dirt-cheap prices and enourmous flexebility.

Re:Try this

[mshiltonj]

I switched to nearlyfreespeech a couple months ago. Here's what I have to say about them.

2 host stories

[hammeredpeon]

well, in the past 6 months i've had 2 different hosts, and i have (almost) nothing but good things to say about each.

the first host i went with was dailyrazor. they provide you with a private JVM for about $20 a month, give you 10 mysql/postgresql database, a decent amount of space, unlimited subdomains, bladiblah.

good: they have excellent support. i had trouble getting hibernate working, and they were actually googling with me trying to find out what was causing my problem (the database connections would get severred it seemed and wouldn't reestablish themselves; it eventually turned out to be that hibernate's connection pooling capabilities are crap and you need to use something like c3p0).

bad: they don't support RoR. at all. i emailed them and asked them to install ruby, and they had no problem doing it. they didn't want to install rails, and said i would have to do that myself. i ended up installing rails to my home directory and using that to generate applications, and then put them in my www directory and -bam- they worked. for some reason the host didn't like this, though, and he would chown my ruby executable to root:root, which broke my application. after they did this twice, with no warning either time, and no explanation that followed their actions, i decided it was time to find a new host.

now i'm with asmallorange and, though their java support isn't nearly as good as dailyrazor's (they use resin instead of tomcat, which is really only a problem for me because i don't know resin at all), they have excellent support for rails and fastcgi. i rewrote my weblog in rails because it was easier to do that than to figure out how to change my java-weblog to work with resin.

anyways, i'd recommend asmallorange because they're cheap, have lots of capabilities (php, rails, java, perl), don't put arbitrary limits on things (unlimited mysql databases, subdomains, etc), and have pretty good support 24/7. their support isn't as good as dailyrazor's, but it's pretty close.

feel free to email me (you can go to my website and use the email) if you have any questions about either of these hosts.

hope that helps!

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.

Netcraft Server Uptime Table

[dmaduram]

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.

Hosts that sponsor open source projects

[Anonymous Cowdog]

I know it sounds like a /. cliche, a guy on slashdot saying you should see who supports open source, and go with that provider. But that's what I'm going to say.

Not so much because they support open source, but more because if an OSS project is hosted there, it's probably there because of the quality, not just because of the sponsorship. OSS projects are run by savvy people who know how to not stay stuck on a bad host.

If you look around at where various respected OSS sites are hosted, a few big names keep popping up. pair.com and he.net, for example. No referral links here.

But do your own research. I could not recommend the sites I use (the above two) to you without knowing your needs. If you need hand holding, go with someone else. If you want a nice clean toolbox, they are OK. If you want a company that answers the phone with a human on the third ring 24x7, he.net is good, if a little stingy with the disk space and transfer allocation.

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.

Re:I don't know of any review sites but...

[bhiestand]

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.

Personal Colo

[markcic]

Not really a review site but a good listing of personal colo sites. Personal Co-location Registry