Open web hosting forum is one of the most important place to collect reviews and comments from real customers, and find a host. Anyone, including you and me and web hosting customers, is free to express his/her opinion. Almost every post remains unedited.
Web hosting forums have different types of post and reviews. Web hosting providers or business owners write favorable reviews for their company or business. Competitors write negative reviews. Fortunately, these are not the common cases. And if there are any doubts for the reviewer’s credibility, forum users can ask for explanations. Forum moderators, usually web hosting experts, often browse posts and remove what should be removed.
When we are reading a web hosting review, it is important who writes the review. The more posts a reviews has, the longer he has been a member of the forum, the more credit we should give him/her. And we may pay attention to the reviewer’s profile and signature. If he/she has a website hosted by the reviewed host, that means he/she has nothing to hide and we may use his/her website as sample.
My favorite web hosting forum is WebHostingTalk (WHT). This forum has only one focus - web hosting, covers all topics from shared hosting to dedicated hosting. If I can visit only one forum to collect reviews and comments, WHT is my choice with no doubt.
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. Now you can post a thread on web hosting forums with these 2-5 hosts, asking for review and comment. The post should include detail information, such as how much storage space and bandwidth you need, how many visitors you will have, what technical specification your website requires. With these detail information, you will receive much more useful feedback than the post with only a few words such as “What is the best hosts?”.
Support forums of web hosting companies are important when searching for a host. Hosts use such forums to allow customers to interact to each other and also as an alternative means to provide support. 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. If you find that the company delete threads that may damage their reputation, instead of solving the problems, you should ignore that company immediately.
JustHost and HostMonster have good reputation on WHT. You can search their name on WHT for reviews from real customers. Of course you can read my JustHost review and HostMonster review for reference.
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