Identifying and Avoiding Dishonest Hosting Providers?

An anonymous reader asks: "Recently I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the buyout and resulting problems problems of Managed.com by WebHostPlus, Alphared (aka Orangefiber) being dishonest about backup facilities (no power backups and not multi-homed), and CalPop overselling bandwidth. What can we do to protect us from these companies, they all seem to be have web sites and be real companies, but we seem to get scammed by them. The dishonest ones look a lot like the honest ones. We can't afford the attorney's fees or to build a data-center, and that is why we pay the monthly fee to host a server, but the companies do not have what they claim to, nor do they care about the customers. We contacted two attorneys in the United States and they said that the companies didn't have any assets worth going after. What does Slashdot think of these problems and what can we do to avoid them?"

Comments

Re:Google?

[ottothecow]

Thats exactly what happened with me when I went with CI Host many years back. It was after they became a dirty host but not that long after so there were still a lot of good things floating around as well as their propaganda machine's creations. They had done a good job of surpressing all of the negatives (stuff like replacing the actually negative links spot on search engines with stuff that looked like forum postings of a guy saying these bad things he had heard about them but people replying with "nah, thats just a bad rumor, they are great")

Then I saw dreamhost (link takes $7 off your first bill) in an ask slashdot and we couldnt be happier. $7 a month gets me WAY more stuff than $25 got with CI Host as well as some great (and good humored, if you ever take the time to read some of their postings or newsletters) support.