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Where can I find Web Hosting Services Reviews?
There are a ton of sites that claim to have reviews of these services, but I want to make sure that these reviews are legitimate. Any suggestions on a site I can trust?
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2 Answers
None of the sites that advertise can be trusted. They all operate on a pure pay-per-click basis from the vendors.
You are better off searching for the site name in some forums and seeing how often people praise or curse them. Here are some of the companies that either I or trusted friends have direct experience with:
3Tera and CIHost: Experience with these companies were very negative. I will not go into all the things that went wrong, because it would be easier to list the few things that went right, but I recommend avoiding them.
Rackspace: Apart from hosting your own hardware at a co-location facility, they seem be be the best so far, but are certainly not perfect. Things like the report writer we were using, and various third-party DLLs we were using did not work. It took several attempts before we had a full set of scripts that could move over the DB, active server pages, sendmail files, init files, config files, etc., that we needed and have everything working.
- Rackspace's technical support is good and responsive. We've been able to get support 24x7 (e.g., at 2:30 AM on as Sunday morning). They tend to know what they are talking about and are fairly candid.
- A major concern for us is to have as much control over our applications as possible (e.g., not just being able to update DB statistics so that queries run faster, but being able to override the Query Analyzer suggestions, or change the Apache server settings at all levels, etc. Rackspace doesn't give us complete control, of course, but gives us more than the alternatives we looked at. However, almost all of this is done through their "control panel." That is a good interface when it's working, but we have had two instances so far when it was not working. It usually is fixed within 12-24 hours, but we were not given notice of the problems, until we found them, even though it seems clear that Rackspace already knew of the problems.
Buggy behavior there caused problem such as copying over directories to Rackspace that we know are there but can't be seen, or permissions being screwed up for directory structures (and in a very unintuitive way).
- Their new center in Texas, seems to have more trouble than the older centers. They have had site failures at least 3 times in the past 8 months or so.
Simon is right to a point. The majority of the web hosting reviews sites are not to be trusted. In fact, a handful of them are actually owned by the vendors themselves. However, there are third party sites that do offer objective reviews submitted by real users. http://www.webhostingunleashed.com/shared/ audits every shared hosting review by hand. Each review must be confirmed by the user via email, the IP's are checked and anything fishy warrants a direct email to the user. They'll also act as a liason between the user and vendor to help mediate any outstanding issues.
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