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

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.

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!

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.