The murky world of web host directories

There’s certainly no shortage of web hosting directory and review sites online today. Our estimates put the figure at over 1000, all pledging to help you find the ‘best’ host for your needs. Unfortunately however there is a setback. Hosting directories and review sites fall into 3 categories.

1. Honest review/directory sites who are owned by companies wishing to help the user
2. Review/directory sites owned by hosting companies, wishing to direct more traffic to themselves
3. Review/directory sites owned by affiliate markters, wishing to direct traffic to their highest paying affiliate links

No marks for guessing which two are the most popular.

Whilst we have no objections to sites being run as businesses with the goals of profitability, some sites take this to the extreme. Some directory/review sites REFUSE to give us an honest listing because we do not want to work with them. They deliberately give us a low ranking or bad reviews, simply because we want honesty. A perfect example is http://www.vistainter.com/reviews/W/webhostingbuzz.com/. Our rating on here isn’t great and after reading through every single review, I could only find a handful I could link back to actual clients of ours. As we do not advertise with them, we get false reviews and a bad rating…. which is hardly fair.

Without wanting to get too much into a legal loop hole, our motto of the story is look for real reviews when searching for a web host. We elected to setup our Facebook page where clients can post real reviews and you can verify their authenticity by checking out the Facebook account. There’s no way to forge these and we’re proud of the reviews we get on Facebook.

So the moral of the story? Take the directory sites with a pinch of salt and do real research before deciding. If the directory consists of advert after advert, avoid it. You’ll see at many directories, the top 10 lists of hosting company are the same — those that payout the highest affiliate payouts. These top lists do not reflect how good the hosting company is.