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Sites for Hosting Reviews - Good and Bad Hosts
MTUser2012
Member
in Reviews
When buying a hosting service now I always try to look for reviews. I know that I can check reviews here. And in a negative sense, I can check LEB. If I find the host there, I know not to buy.
I also found quite a few reviews on https://trustpilot.com/. I even signed up for an account and started reviewing hosts there. But what about other review sites? Is there a site that providers think is particular good or trustworthy that they like to get good reviews on?
I like to give good feedback to help the good providers as well as warning others of shady hosts.
Comments
Congraulations, you are the 1% (non-shill). I've seen so much praise for fly-by-night summerhosts and craptalk about trusted, self-sustaining ones, that I don't even pretend those review sites are worth the electrons they take to run.
Well, Reviews, my opinion on that meh.
They cannot be trusted, a lot of people trying to fake it, or even the company/website itself behind it is getting paid to fake them.
Invoices with Fake names can just be generated and faked.
You would need to ask for ID everytime, but no one does that.
I would trust reviews in forums more then on some site, but still, everything is questionable until fully validated.
LET is kinda trustworthy on reviews, every fake shit gets banned and trashed.
We could make a list of it, linked to LET maybe.... maybe
Imagine the irony if he was the owner of TrustPilot. Rethink your 1%
Then he would also be a shill.
EDIT3:
Voted AngiesList.
Yhanks.
Yes, it would be ironic. But, I am not. I am just a guy that has a lot of sites, so I am always buying hosting. I think I have around 40 shared hosting accounts. Most of these accounts, came from WHT. The majority are OK, but I have had one or two lemons.
My motto: Never trust reviews, not just in hosting industry but also in general.
Especially avoid "paid" reviews AKA "professional critics".
For a good example, pro critics at Rotten tomatoes are paid shills.
What are you talking about? I that I make bank by watching and reviewing 20 year old movies, then fighting about it. in the comment/forum area.
I also run a professional services business. That business gets reviews from its clients that are uniformly very good, 5 star. I find that clients see the reviews and want to hire us. So I think the average consumer likes and trusts reviews.
If the review sites are good, well policed by the owner, the fake reviews don't last. For example, hotels and restaurants, TripAdvisor is good. None of my bad reviews about establishments has ever been taken down. My good reviews have themselves received likes. And there seems to be reliable correlation between establishments with good reviews and a quality, enjoyable experience. I'd say the same is true for AirBNB.
I still won't believe what you deem honest reviews.
I will make my own judgement based on what I can find. I am too crooked to trust strangers' words.
As mentioned, reviews are very easy to fake - and by anyone.
The provider itself can fake positive reviews, competitors can fake negative reviews, customers can fake reviews.
why not just get a good reseller account from one of your good host you are with and just have all your sites in one place instead of all the different ones you are with now
Not all review are fake , I always check the reviews before purchasing , The hostadivce is good site for reviews .
If you want a reliable review there is no way around personal experience.
>
From your personal experience , which host is reliable ?
Hetzner, Lunanode.
Use your own bs detector. If it's too good to be true, there's a catch. If it's shit on paper it's shit for real. If the ad is full of bad spelling and grammar, avoid. If the host on LET craps on other hosts on LET, avoid. If the price is really low, set your expectations lower. If it's on the last 20 pages of LEB, forget it, unless you know otherwise. If it's buffalo only, hell no. If it's selling reseller hosting for $1/year forget it and forget their $8/year vps because it will suck.
Here's my anecdotal experience for using the following hosts over 15 years for 3 Wordpress-based music sites with moderate to heavy traffic and no CDN, other than Cloudflare:
Whatever you decide, use BunnyCDN. It's proven to be quite the affordable CDN for images AND music files.
I agree .Very Cheep vps share resources with other users , reliable hosting offer dedicated resource vps , I always ask the host if the resource is allocated or shared .
If you are running something as a hobby and you don't care how shit it is, then by all means find the absolute cheapest you can find and roll the dice on it. These are your <$24/year VPS
If you're running something as a hobby and you do care how shit it is, then look at paying monthly. Usually the shitty oversold crap is on yearly prepay.
If you're running a business, look away from the ultra-cheap and shell out a few extra bucks. Jesus, if it's making you money then at least show it some love.
If you're running a large business, seriously... I'm talking 100 staff, start looking at actual enterprise solutions. You could pretty much be assured nobody on LET (with maybe a couple of exceptions) would be any good.
If you're a government and want to host your country's IT infrastructure, then you need to forget about LET/LEB and talk to Google/Amazon/IBM etc directly. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at least.
mmmm yes indeed time is nigh to review all the review sites ... but who will review the review site reviewers?
EDIT2:
seriously though, spend a few months or years absorbing noise and nonsense on LET with your bullshit detector turned up to 11, and one might enjoy the delusion of having developed an infallible nose for
the good (such as https://www.vpsadvice.com/)
the bad ... (LEB, say no more)
and the ugly:
"I have a very important profile on the forum"
EDIT3.14: YMMV ...
EDIT4.20:
YHBT, HAND
You and I have very similar experience. I started with Hostgator shared hosting and quickly outgrew its limitations. I was always looking for the good quality, reliable hosting for a reasonable price. I totally understand that if it sounds to good to be true, it is, and I won't be happy with the crappy, oversold service.
Like you, I picked up two VPSs from SSDNodes recently. I have been very pleased with the performance and price. I had two 4GB slices with BuyVM and moved my sites to one of the SSDNodes VPS. The performance is better and the price was lower.
Thanks for the tip about BunnyCDN. I'll check them out.
Funny, I'm actually considering moving to BuyVM, since it is less expensive than my SSDNodes instance and would give me more storage, should I want/need it.
I'm testing an instance with LetBox too, since I wanted to test out Psychz, and I'm pleased so far. I think I'll end up moving there, or BuyVM...still testing both.
Trust pilot is just weaponisation of reviews.
Tbh I find Google Reviews still to be among the most authentic ones when speaking of review sites. Sure you can buy 1 million likes but there's also lots of authentic reviews out there since everyone who has a google account/a phone can comment/rate on there and usually it's not too hard to tell fake/real apart there. The easy accessibility makes for a high review frequency and count. Lots of ppl won't even sign up for Trustpilot etc (me neither) but people are fast to use their phones to write about how good or bad their meal at restaurant xy tasted just now, how they were treated in store xy...
How so? The reviews for your service on trustpilot are good. Yes, you have a couple of 1 stars, but you responded. On balance your responses seem more reasonable than the complaints. Some customers of every business are jerks. I think most people know that you can please 100 customers and only 10 may leave you a positive review. On the flip side, you can disappoint 3 customers and all 3 will give you bad reviews. So you have done great, and the fact that you are a top provider shines through on trustpilot.
For my part, I recognize the fact that most people who are happy don't leave reviews. That is why I am interested in leaving good reviews for good providers where it will help them the most.
TrustPilot or HostAdvice are "technically" the best places to leave reviews because they rank high on SEO, specifically TrustPilot since it's their whole business model.
It is good for people leaving reviews, but like Anthony said it can be weaponized because TrustPilot's policies. They don't verify reviews, they have no safeguards to prevent fake reviews, and because of their policy it takes 2-5 weeks normally to delete fake reviews, which by that time you've already got hit with with it in Google. Their policy dictates that they never delete reviews, and the process to get a fake review removed entails the company to attempt to contact the reviewer, then wait 1 week. Then you must make a second attempt to contact the reviewer, which means 2nd week. After no response you can report the review which can take their "compliance team" around a week to check. And in the end they choose whether or not to remove it, but if they don't remove it they don't provide the company any reason. (I've even asked them to remove 5 star reviews I knew were fake, so the reviewer could edit the review in the future and make it 1 star, and the same process has to be done..)
I wouldn't think they're bad if they actually treated companies better, since it's impossible to get your company removed from their website without going through a court probably. And they're a European company, so any smaller U.S. company is out of luck since their U.S branches are just shared workspaces.
I haven't used HostAdvice really, but their site is genuinely good, but it focuses around hosting sooo..
The only reason I have this opinion is because I was forced to use TrustPilot originally because of one guy making 20+ 1 star reviews and trying to waste days/weeks of my time dealing with TrustPilot's crap compliance team. Before that, I never used those review sites or asked for reviews.
Appreciate it for leaving that review though a while back, though
Yes but what you do not see are the countless hours I have spent having to keep it clean, it is a REAL drain on a small business to attract a troll.
The problem with trustpilot is that it is trusted, so imagine one of the threads you might read here that you think WOW this guy is an idiot, like that guy that complained about loosing access to his service for DDOS'ing people.
Now they just register 50 fake accounts (trust pilot do not require you to validate yourself and do zero checks, even public proxies are fine) and you TRASH a small business because your right in the middle of your hissy fit.
The company than banned him AND refunded him now probably have to spend 30 hours cleaning up all his fake reviews.
While trust pilot does offer mechanisms to remove reviews it is HEAVILY weighted on the buys side and it takes a lot of going back and forth to do it right, a process that a troll can really stretch out with no real effort.
Put that together with the fact that most people don't review anything that just works and you have a time pit for trolls which is really bad for any growing business.
I read an article on this a while back there are successful groups in India that businesses pay (some big ones) to trash competition and maintain their own 4 star rating, trust pilot have been made aware of it at the highest level, they essentially deny it is happening, they have a real head in the sand attitude to the idea of fake reviews.
So if used properly, yes it is great, but it absolutely can be and is weaponized on a small scale all the way up to the top.
I agree with many of the previous posters. Forums are a great place to see detailed experiences and are much less likely to be from some canned spam provider considering the info on post numbers and that they are generally more depth so that you can more likely tell if the post is believable or not, compared to a Facebook post or something like that... some forums to scan I'd recommend beyond this one would be:
http://www.datacentertalk.com/forum/
https://www.hostingdiscussion.com
https://community.spiceworks.com/
http://forums.hostsearch.com/
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/
I also really like https://www.datacentermap.com/ the guys/gals who run the site are very communicable and friendly though a quote through them might add more extra bucks to your service than if you directly find a provider.