How to find the hosting for your needsby |
Web hosting reviews search strategy The search for web hosting reviews is a very important (if not the most important) part of your whole web hosting shopping strategy. Shopping for hosting is not exactly easy because today's hosting offer is very-very vast. It is huge! There are thousands of big and smal web hosting companies out there. Many categorized into the cheap, medium and expensive categories. Face it, you get what you pay for, so it is not wise to opt for a cheap solution over the others. Quite often you are promised something in the website and you end up with something else. Its not hard to find web hosts, for starters, you can even get a free web host, although your pages will be ad infested, may not be an ideal solution for professional website building. Best places to find good hosts are Web Hosting forums. On the other hand, companies that charge more may not necessarily be giving better service. The best way to get the best hosting is by reading reviews on web hosting companies, in forums/review sites. Best places to look for webhosting reviews are web hosting forums. Watch out for competitors posting bad about each other and web hosts recommending themselves. See a few threads to see the quality of moderation available at the forum. You might want to know more about the person posting the review. A person who's been around more, and has posted more reviews is worth lending an ear to. Also, if the profile/signature of the reviewer, or review itself includes a website hosted by the discussed host, this ultimately gives you some reassurance that the person has nothing to hide. Preferably the reviewer should link to a site he has with the company that is reviewed. Some of the active web hosting forums for finding reviews are WebHostingTalk (aka WHT) and HostHideout, Hostingdiscussion.com, Resellerboard.com SitepointForums.com as well. WebHostingTalk is much more populated than the others and it has a customer focused approach compared to HostHideout, which is essentially a forum geared towards hosts and their problems. If you'd like to visit more web hosting chats and forums you can find some at DMOZ - web hosting chats and forums. Suppose you were looking for a hosting company named "XYZ" then search each forum for the name of the host, to see the list of the discussions involving the webhost. If u dont find the results satisfactory you can use google to find all instances of that word by typing in "XYZ site:www.webhostingforum.com". If that doesnt help just participate in the discussion asking for recommendations for your requirements and budget. If you decide to start a search for hosts, it is good to have a relatively long initial list of hosts to start with (say 20 or so). Then you must find and read as many reviews as you can about each of them. Your goal should be to gradually eliminate hosts until you only have to choose between 2-5 of them - the fewer the better. Most hosting companies have a forum of their own (often called a support forum). Hosts use such forums to allow customers to interact to each other and also as an alternative means to provide support. Not all such forums can be used by people other than their clients. Often though, you can register (for free) and post presales questions or just participate in the discussions. Great is the fact that you can see what/if problems occur often and how problems are dealt with. The ultimate benefit is that you can contact their customers and find out what they think about the service: are they satisfied, did they notice certain problems that never get solved etc. The way the company manages the support forum is also important. If instead of acknowledging problems and doing their best to solve them, they make a habit out of deleting threads that might damage their image, I would have serious second thoughts about using their service. I believe deleting threads it's an unprofessional manner of handling such things. To find out about these things try to contact their customers, start a new thread asking for this kind of feedback or spend some time on their forums carefully watching for suspicious things. After the above procedure, i was able to boil down my options of hosts to own host: midPhase. About MidPhase midPhase Services, Inc. has an excellent reputation for offering quality server hardware and low hosting prices. MidPhase.com are placed on servers with dual processors, loaded with more than 4GBs of RAM. Put in simple terms, that is more robustness and reliability offered by other hosting companies many times over, its unbeatably powerful. midPhase Services, Inc. utilizes the Equinix datacenter facilities in Chicago, IL and each server is connected to a line burst-able up to 100 MBPS. Bandwidth carriers include Time Warner, Internap, Bellsouth, and others Statement From midPhase midPhase Services, Inc. is a privately held web hosting and Internet services company based out of Chicago. midPhase provides budget, shared, advanced and other types of web hosting services to a wide range of clients ranging from small business to individuals. Providing a robust technological base, and reasonable pricing, midPhase is able to offer customers an unbeatable value. midPhase is able to distinguish itself from countless other providers by offering an incredible value to our customers. This combination of advanced products and affordability has helped midPhase retain a record breaking growth pattern, faster than the industry average every month since inception. Unlike most webhosting providers, midPhase owns all of the hardware it uses. midPhase does not rent or lease servers. Customer Focus When we designed our products, we did so with the average small business in mind. What do small businesses want in a web hosting account? For starters, to be able to build a website and setup E-mail without paying a designer to do it for them. Small businesses need hand holding, and we're ready and happy to help. Company Location One of our largest advantages is our location. Our home office is directly across the street from the tallest building in the United States, the Sears Tower in Chicago. Being located in the Chicago Loop (the Central Business District is refered to as the 'Loop') has many advantages, quick access to our datacenter (which is just down the street) and an advanced, reliable fiber and power infrastructure already in place. midPhase Hosting Benefits midPhase offers 12,000MB of disk space and unmetered data transfer can be had for as little as $95.40/yr. ($7.95/mo.). with a free domain name and 99.98% uptime guarantee. Coming in the package are unlimited email addresses, sub domains, and a Terabyte(1000GB) of bandwidth transfer. midPhase Hosting Support As long as I remember i've had good experience with these people as far as support is concerned. I've had my emails replied in just a few hours and some times in just 5 minutes! URL:http://www.midphase.com/newaff/ Words of caution: 1. Reading threads can be a very time consuming task. It can sometimes take you a few hours just to read all the threads about a single company. If you decide not to use my list of selected web hosting companies, be prepared to spend some time searching and reading on those forums. 2. No hosting company will have only happy customers. So don't worry if you find an occasional negative review or opinion. Look at how the situation is handled by the host (usually the host replies). Also keep in mind that unhappy customers are much more likely to complain than happy customers are to praise.
About the Author Jim is the owner of ArcCode and PentiumHead. |
For Affordable, Business, E-Commerce, Cheap and Linux Web Hosting Providers visit Linux Web Hosting For ASP, .Net, Windows Web Hosting Providers visit Windows Web Hosting |