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Most web hosting directories are listing only the web hosting
providers that pay to be included or pay on sales resulting from leads
coming from these sites. They do not give you any idea of which hosts
are good and which are bad! 68% of the directories that I
have researched are either very obviously showing only advertising hosts or
are not giving any useful information to assist a buyer to choose good
reliable web hosting providers. There are a small
number of good web hosting directories that do provide genuine information
showing the best companies but even some of these top results can be skewed
if the web hosting company is good at marketing itself and uses a proactive
survey system to make it easy for it's customers to provide feedback.
This can go as far as providing the customer with positive default answers
to the questions so all the customer has to do is click 'submit'.
Typical problems with these directories:
Neglected sites - The directory shows out of date
information for hosting plans - The web hosting world changes so rapidly -
One directory showed it's best web hosting company but when you clicked to
visit this wonderful company, you found the host was no longer in business.
Many directories pretending to show you the best 5/ 10/ 20
web hosting companies often include some of the worst companies at the top
of their charts! These poor web hosting companies have a bad
reputation in the industry and horrendous reviews from a large number of
customers but the naive newbie gets caught time and time again.
Some directories tell you how they have selected their top
10 best companies because the hosts are reliable, good value etc. but
provide no evidence of the actual process of selection and on the occasional
site where they review each of their top hosts, you strangely find out that
not one of the reviews says anything even slightly critical of the hosts.
On some directory sites they do give slightly critical
reviews and percentage scores for their top 5/ 10 web hosts but why do they
include a web host that scores relatively poorly? There are literally
thousands of web hosting companies to choose from so why put a badly
performing one in your list of the best? Could it be that the web
hosting company in question pays better than most?
Blatant lies - One web site I looked at, says
it has been getting over 50,000 hits but the
Alexa traffic rating
shows it is rated around 5.4 million (where 1 = busiest web site in world
and anything below 500,000 has very little traffic) which means it is lucky
to get a handful of visitors a day. The same site is selling
advertising and guaranteeing the advert will be displayed 50,000 times.
It will take about 30 years to display that many adverts so buyer beware!
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