Today, I was thinking about web hosting reviews sites and if they really help you to decide which web hosting company could be the best for your blog. A friend of mine, ASP programmer, recently was looking for Windows hosting and we were trying to find cheap hosting for his project.
I really couldn’t help him that much as I haven’t ran an ASP coded site in for 4 years and that was back at my last job as a web designer for some company, at that time we were hosting a client website on a windows server. So I started to ask a few friends and I discovered that no one in the blogging community run websites on Windows, and most of my friends are using WordPress, which runs better on Linux
So, here is how we found a web hosting…
We did a Big Mistake!
We thought we would look around and find a few web hosting reviews sites. He liked one of these sites and decided to go with the hosting company with the best review.
After one week, he contacted me and he was very upset! And, damn it! We discovered the ugly truth!
We discovered that some of these websites have no real reviews, I assume that the web masters who runs these websites added reviews by themselves. They added reivews maybe on their on their point of view, or maybe by looking around to see what other web hosting reviews websites had to say. We found fake reviews and ended up with a full refund.
Alright.. Let’s do it the right way this time!
We started to look again until we found a nice website called WebHostingGeeks.com. We looked into the site and checking the website hosting reviews. It seemed to give fair reviews by real people, although I didn’t like it that much when reviews were made by Anonymous users, but.. Well… At least it says something helpful and still makes sense. Of course, I would love it more if reviews are made by only registered users which add more credibility, and allow you to track those users or members and read all their reviews if they have more than one!
Although it’s fun to read user reviews, if you read some over WebHostingGeeks.com -especially about the best Windows web hosting category- you will know what I mean 🙂 The very good thing was a big help for us to avoid the same mistake this time!
How to Find a Reliable Web Hosting!
When you look for a new web hosting, or if you are having problems with your hosting and want to move to a better service, whatever you reason is, it makes a lot of sense to start by:
- Asking your close and trusted friends
- Ask your readers
- Check where other blogs you read are hosted at
- Probably the last step is to do some research
So, let’s talk about these..
1- Ask your close and trusted friends
Start with your friends, especially your close friends, send a few emails or tweets asking for recommendation, explain to them your web hosting problem or requirements so they can help you best. I’ve done that, and I’ve got amazing responds, it was really really useful.
2- Write a blog post and ask your readers
I also published a blog post asking for my reader’s opinion, and I couldn’t believe the amount of comments and reactions on that post. I’ve gotten a ton of recommendations that really helped me a lot to find the best web hosting solution for my blog.
This even helped me to pass the bad hosting days when FamousBloggers was suffering from bad connections and going down more than once at the same day, I can say that sharing this information and involving your readers is a big thing, you are doing yourself a favor, so instead of being mad at you and hating your blog.. Your blog readers will appreciate your situation and will try to help you if you share with them!
You will not believe that, I even got 4 invitations from friends to host my blog for free on their dedicated servers!!!
The secret here, was to ask! So never hesitate to talk about problems with your blog readers, no body is perfect, and there is a lot of good people who are welling to help, they just don’t know you need their help!
3- Check other blogs
By checking other blogs -especially those blogs which has the same level of development, design elements and amount of traffic your blog gets- you are able to get more ideas about where you can host your own blog, you can also contact owners of these blogs directly using their contact pages and ask them where they are hosting their blogs and if they recommend the same company for you.
4- Do your search and research!
Google for web hosting companies, read information about companies on discussion forums and web hosting reviews sites, check more than one website, take notes about features, web spaces and prices, compare all these data and try to find out which one is th best for you, it doesn’t have to be a cheap hosting, just choose what’s the best for your blog.
Probably you will get a good advice, I’ve tried five hosting companies during the last a few years, my first was GoDaddy, I had some bad experience with them, which lead me to understand the fact that GoDaddy is the best for Domain names management. I went through 5 other hosting companies, starting from BlueHost where I hosted FamousBloggers. Then things did not work good enough to stay another year with BlueHost and the blog is growing, has heavy code and traffic, and because BlueHost has no other option but only shared hosting, so I had to move FamousBloggers to HosGator VPS servers.
Again.. Does Web Hosting Reviews Really Help?
I think the answer is Yes!.. What you think?
Web hosting reviews sites can help, you just need to be on the right website!
I am looking forward to hear from you, so plz share your thoughts