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Web hosting reviews search strat
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The search for web hosting reviews is a very important (if not the most important) part of your whole web hosting shopping strategy. Shopping for hosting is not exactly easy because today's hosting offer is very-very vast. It is huge! There are thousands of bigger and smaller web hosting companies. And there are cheap, not-so-cheap and expensive web hosting services. Economically or mathematically, you should go for the cheap solution. After all, if you can get the same thing for fewer dollars (or euros or whatever) it makes sense to go for it. Unfortunately, it's not that simple because "on paper" you are promised similar things. In reality, you will or you will not get what you were promised. It might not be very difficult to find web hosting companies (just go to DMOZ - hosting category and you'll find enough web hosting companies to visit a whole week) but what can you do to select the really good ones? If you take two web hosting companies that offer similar packages at different prices you might be tempted to believe that the one that charges more would provide a better service. This is not necessarily true. My opinion is that the only real and effective criterion in selecting between two or more web hosting companies is to obtain real reviews from real customers. My favorite places to look for web hosting reviews are the open, public forums. Anyone (you and me included) is free to express himself/herself there and so are the web hosting customers and almost every time anything we post remains there unedited by third parties (as long as we are polite and web follow the rules of each particular forum). Forums have some limitations of course, such as business owners writing favorable reviews for their own company or business competitors that write negative reviews about competitors, but these are rare cases and fortunately, if there are any doubts regarding the credibility of the reviewer, the forum participants ask for explanations. So, in general, the public forums are a valuable tool for finding out what's the reputation of a certain hosting company. Not all reviews are the same. Some are more valuable than others. For example, while some are really detailed, some are really basic "yes, I use xyz company and it's really great." It is also important who writes the review. If the reviewer has more than 100 posts in the forum I tend to give more credit to his words. Also, if the profile includes a website (a www or website button), this ultimately gives you some reassurance that the person has nothing to hide. My favorite web hosting forums are WebHostingTalk (aka WHT) and HostHideout. I especially visit WebHostingTalk because it's much more populated than the others. If you'd like to visit more web hosting chats and forums you can find some at DMOZ - web hosting chats and forums. Lets suppose that you decided to search for reviews about the company "BogusHosting" (not a very good name, is it? ). The first step would be to go to the Search page of that forum (almost every forum has a search page). Then all you have to do is type the name BogusHosting in the appropriate field. A good idea is to look for "Bogus Hosting" too, as some users might've put a space between those two words when reviewing. Then basically all you have to do is press the "search" button and the results will appear. When I'm at WHT I often select the "Search titles only" option. That yields less but much more valuable search results. If the results do not not satisfy you (not enough of them or inconclusive) then you can create a new thread and ask for customer reviews on that company (that usually means you have to register on that forum - it's free if it's an "open" forum). My advice is to first select 2 (maximum 3) web hosting companies that really interest you. Then ask for opinions about them. Do not use a thread to ask opinions on 10 companies. You get better results if you concentrate on just a few. Also specify that you're looking for customer reviews to prevent people from posting "I heard that they're good/bad" stuff. Most likely, if you select those 2 or 3 companies the right way (based on already existing customer reviews), you'll find that they're all very good and that you can choose any one of them, which is kind of nice . This is the only time when I would think about saving a few bucks by going with the one that's cheaper. But! You might want to Test those web hosting companies first! One note of caution: If a company does not have a 30-days-no-questions-asked-money-back-guarantee or a free one month trial, I advise you not to pay for a whole year in advance. Pay monthly. If things turn out to be less than what you expected, you might be able to move without losing much money. Actually, I woudn't pay yearly from the start anyway. I would pay monthly at first and, after a while, maybe I would pay yearly. Maybe! Another note of caution: Reading those threads can be a very time consuming task. It can sometimes take you more than 4 hours to read all the threads about a single company. If you decide not to use my list of "very good" web hosting companies, be prepared to spend a lot of time searching and reading on those forums. Last note of caution: No hosting company will have only happy customers. So don't worry if you find an occasional negative review or opinion. Look how the situation is handled by the host (usually the host replies). Also keep in mind that unhappy customers are much more likely to complain than happy customers are to praise. With that, I wish you success in finding a very good, honest web hosting company. http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/articles/6/287/0/1 |
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