Analyzing Web Hosting Reviews

When you want to launch your first website, you will want to use a third-party hosting company. This is the most cost effective and the most technically efficient way to publish your website so that everybody can see it. Being new to publishing websites, you will want to shop around various hosting services, and will almost certainly use web hosting reviews among your selection criteria. It is always a good idea to check out what other people have to say about any given service, and that includes companies providing hosting services. However, you cannot take at face value everything you read about a particular service or company. You have to try to sort out the genuine reviews from those that have been published with an ulterior motive. That includes those that have been deliberately positive in an effort to promote a company or service, and those that have been deliberately negative because they have been posted by somebody who hopes to drive potential customers away from a competitor. Nearly all the major hosting companies have affiliate or referral programs. Anybody who refers a new customer to the host will get a commission if that person signs up for the host’s services. The terms and conditions of these programs forbid the use of underhand techniques, but policing the methods used by online marketers is an impossible task. One of the most unscrupulous online activities is where people set up product or service review sites, and then fill them with positive reviews of products or services for which they can earn commission. Some will also post negative reviews of competing products. The hope is that people will be put off buying the product or service that has a negative review, and instead buy something for which the reviewer will receive a commission. When you are trying to find a host for your website and you read web hosting reviews, you need to keep in mind that the evaluations you read may not be quite as impartial as you might think. Sometimes, it can be impossible to tell whether a review is genuine, or whether it is just commission fodder. There are some signs that you can look out for and enhance your ability to understand and recognize the often subtle differences between biased and unbiased hosting reviews.

Affiliate links and tracking codes

When commission is payable, there has to be some way for the vendor to reward the referring website, and tracking codes are the most common way for this to happen. As you read a review, if you hover the mouse over the links to the service being reviewed, the web address that link is pointing to will show in your status bar. If you see a string of characters after the website name, then that is almost certainly tracking code data.

No original information

If the supposed review only rehashes what you can read online about the product or service website, you can be fairly certain that the reviewer has never actually used the product or service.

Excessive praise

If the review contains lots of superlatives, it is unlikely to be genuine, and is probably a sales pitch. We have all bought products or services that we are very pleased with, and that we would recommend to others, but we would not go over the top in our descriptions. Web Hosting Talk is a good resource to use when looking for honest conversations about the quality of almost any hosting service. Web hosting reviews are useful in evaluating hosting providers. However, you need to treat them the same way as you would references by checking them out to ensure they are valid. Remember, just because a reviewer is getting commission and gives positive reviews does not mean that claims made in the review are inaccurate. Forums often provide the most accurate web hosting reviews, but you need to remember that people are more inclined to make the effort to report negative experiences than positive ones. Continue reading here to develop a better understanding of host company reviews. And finally, good luck with your efforts to locate a reliable provider.