How to find web hosting reviews you could trust?
- Become a liar-detective. Read consciously a lot of anonymous reviews and do not take them for granted and analyze them. Cross-compare them, find discrepancies, read between lines trying to catch signals of paid or fake reviews, paying attention to unsaid details to determine if the review is real or paid. It is exhausting and I’d recommend it using not as a major means of searching for trustful web hosting reviews, but as an additional method in your research.
- Find reviews on real people’s blogs. Read reviews on blogs of people those who has their own experience or shares a trustworthy information. See if their opinions and thoughts are objective and really useful. For example, I encountered web hosting reviews that focused on how patient web hosts’ customer support is. The questions from reviewers to the support were not quite relative to technical support but more like mocking and bulling. Such reviews are useless, because they do mean nothing really significant that will help you to find out a great hosting.
- Find the online community you can trust. Use search and read reviews there. Even if you find such community, try to feel their atmosphere and consider it when reading their recommendations. Also, keep in mind that you may receive recommendations from people who may want to push you to some decision without much of argument. At least the quality of help and information in a specific online community are likely to be much better than anonymous reviews on review web sites. By the way, I recommend visiting WebHostingTalk forum, which is a great place to go and read web hosting reviews or simply opinions and discussions about a particular web host.
- Find/ask someone you trust. Personal recommendations have tremendous power. But anyway, I suggest doing your own research afterwards. In my case I was recommended HostGator but after my own research I did not choose it, because times have changed.
- Test-drive their support before buying hosting. Might be a good thing like in my case with BlueHost when after warm meeting me as a potential client I asked them very politely about hidden fees with proof links and got nothing in reply. Also keep in mind, that even if their support appears to be cool, it may be just their pre-sales team works well 🙂 By the way, in case with EuroVPS it was quite the opposite story. They do not guarantee that their sales team will answer immediately but their ticket tech support promises to get back to you within 15 minutes, which is great.
- Try a web hosting after you think you have read enough web hosting reviews. Web hosts are very likely to offer money back guarantee. I know it is a pain jumping from one web host to another. But it still makes sense if they do not meet your expectations.
You can also use my blog post with pricing-vs-affiliate commissions analysis and the comparison table of different hosts to look at hosting from another perspective before buying it:
As a resume, finding a great hosting is often a question of luck. Even a good web hosting provider may appear not to be great in some cases. It may be just because of a bad luck with hardware (can happen to any host). Or you may be not lucky with neighborhood with the fellow websites on the same server (although a good host takes care of it too as much as possible). Or maybe you wanted a cheap hosting with too high expectations. Investigate the right hosting for you, cross-check the recommendations and reviews.
By the way, here’s my input into making hosts reviews more data-driven and fact-based. I run non-stop tests on some hosts to find the most reliable and the fastest hosting. I call it Hosting Performance Contest:
And when you get a peace of mind for making a decision, try the host. And remember that luck favors the prepared. So prepare well by analyzing web hosting reviews and community opinions and choose the right web hosting so that you are lucky.
What is next?
- The next article from this series discusses what can be wrong with web hosts offering big affiliate commissions.
- You may go back to the table of contents for the article series about web hosting.
- Also, the result of my research that I used myself is the list with my selected web hosts.
- In addition, you are welcome to check out Hosting Performance Contest page where I publish results of my continuous monitoring tests in order to find the most reliable and the fastest hosting.
- Besides, here’s the page where I put together hosting performance live charts (live) and hosting performance historical data so that you could see how the best hosts perform currently and in the past.
- Here’s my pricing-vs-affiliate analysis of hosting: the article and the comparison table (useful method that helps you to find a good host).
- Besides, you are welcome to share you opinion about how you pick out web hosting reviews.
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