Be Careful Of Hosting Reviews That Praise Too Much!
Many hosting providers have affiliate programs that anyone can sign-up to. They then pay commission on all sales made by affiliates, this is how websites like ours and the ‘hosting reviewers’ make money!
The problem with this is that in order to make money the reviewers have to make sales. If they give a bad review of a company, no one will use them and the reviewer won’t make any money. This pushes the affiliates into giving positive reviews, even if the service provider they are reviewing isn’t very good.
We’ve all read the kinds of reviews before that I’m talking about. They give the host 10/10 and say how great the customer service, how amazing the 99.9% uptime is and that you can’t beat the amazing prices! When in truth the affiliate has never used the service, hasn’t researched the service and knows very little about the service provider at all.
How To Avoid Such Reviews
You can use webmaster forums to find out if a provider is any good, forums don’t generally allow affiliate links so unless those replying work for the company (unlikely) you should get decent feedback on whether the company is any good.
You can also try and use websites like ours. In our list of hosting providers we don’t give a full review, we simply list individual companies and give hard facts about them, like how long they have been established, number of customers they have etc etc. This way you can make your own mind up.
So watch out for those hosting reviews who praise too much, they may have an ulterior motive!
Published on July 23, 2008
