Web hosting review sites are one way of choosing a host, to see what other people think before housing your entire business website with a bad hosting provider. Unfortunately, many of these sites are fronts for the providers themselves, are loaded with shill reviews, or list only the hosts that pay the review site owner the highest commissions. You may want to take this into account before trusting them.

First, many “web hosting review” sites offer only what seem to be real reviews, whereas behind the scenes one of the web hosting companies themselves is the owner of the actual review site! Coincidentally, the host owning the site seems to come up at the top of all lists and is the best rated. In other words, the review site is just a promotional front.

Some web hosting review sites are actually legitimate sites that allow users to submit their own reviews, but you can see how this will be abused. Many of these are overrun by phony reviews from the actual hosting companies themselves, skewing the results and the appearance of their own standing among users. It’s not uncommon for some of the lesser-known, and possibly lesser-quality, hosts to create multiple five star reviews to get them to the top of the list.

And finally, most web hosting review sites are created out of a motivation to receive commissions. This is fine in theory, except many of theses types of sites will only rate the highest-paying commission sites with five stars, at the top of lists. So all you are really seeing are lists of web hosts who pay the website owner the most for getting people to sign up. You certainly won’t find reviews of free web hosts on such sites.

In conclusion, beware of so-called “web hosting review” sites that may be contaminated with biased reviews. The best method to research a host before entrusting your business website to it is to look for short comments on blogs instead of full reviews, as these are less apt to be abused by unscrupulous web hosts.

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