Web Hosting Reviews – Are They Scamming You?
Web hosting review sites are one way of choosing a host, to see what other people think before housing your entire business website with a bad hosting provider. Unfortunately, many of these sites are fronts for the providers themselves, are loaded with shill reviews, or list only the hosts that pay the review site owner the highest commissions. You may want to take this into account before trusting them.
One not uncommon technique that some hosts engage in is to create phony “review” sites, showing themselves as the “highest rated” host at the top of all lists. As you can imagine, many of these are from some of the lower quality hosts, as a well-known host with a good reputation would be damaged by the discovery of such a technique.
Secondly, and related to the first problem, even if the review site isn’t actually owned by any hosting company it can be quickly overrun by phony reviews from employees of the hosting companies. And the bad hosts are more motivated to do this as they may have a bad reputation elsewhere on the web. This is quite common on Amazon.com, with authors’ friends creating fake accounts and reviewing just the one book, giving it five stars.
Lastly, many hosts offer commission based upon getting others to sign up with them, and many of the “web hosting review” sites are set up so the highest paying commission hosts are also, strangely, the best reviewed. Hosts that pay little or no commission may not be on the site at all. This is hardly what you would call an honest site.
Keep these caveats in mind when searching for web hosting reviews, or potentially end up with a poor quality hosting provider that gives you endless headaches when you attempt to house your website with them. One way to avoid these problems is to seek out user comments on forums and blogs instead of looking for actual named “reviews.” You can often find many people complaining about or praising web hosts like this that don’t ever mention they are actually “reviewing” a site.
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