Web hosting ratings

How do you rate web hosts? Are web hosting ratings accurate? What do ratings really tell you about a web hosting service? Let's try to answer these questions.

Before you sign up with a new web host, you need to choose between the various plans offered by various companies. You choose by rating the web hosts, either by comparing features like price, disk space, bandwidth, uptime guarantees, technical support offered and so on; or by reading what other people say about the hosts.

There are also many web sites which claim to offer objective 'ratings' of the larger hosting services. You should be careful with those, because they are often just collections of affiliate links, and have nothing bad to say about any of the hosts they feature. In addition, they may not have used the services themselves, so they really don't have any information about particular hosts beyond that which you could easily collect yourself.

Another problem with ratings sites is that they are usually just snapshots in time. Web hosting services are notorious for often starting off well, then going bad under the pressure of customer numbers, hardware failures, or incompetent technical or support staff. Last week's good host can become today's substandard one.

So, what is the best way to get your website hosting ratings? The method we use, which has never let us down, is to read forums dedicated to hosting. One example of a good forum is webhostingtalk.com. Since you are going to be using a host for months, probably years, it's worth spending a few hours on this type of research. Forums have the benefit of giving you information and web hosting ratings written by people who have actually used the services they are commenting on. While problematic hosts or hosts to avoid will become obvious when reading the forums, good or recommended hosts will become obvious too. Even if you already have a particular host in mind, do a search on the forums and see what users are saying about it.

This method of rating web hosts, where you do the work and make your own decisions, is the most timeconsuming, but also the best method. Web hosting ratings from others are never as accurate as using your own judgement based on the most current information about hosting companies.

You may also want to look at our hosting recommendations.