Why?

So you are looking for a web host, how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one?

One way is to find a review site that specializes in these things and use their suggestions.  Good idea, just one small problem.

Many web host review sites are not very honest about what they are doing and why.  A lot of web hosts will pay you to if you can send visitors and ultimately customers to their site. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; it’s just another form of advertising.

The problem is that some hosts pay significantly more for a referral than others do, so the temptation for the review site owner is to give the better paying hosts preferential treatment.  In the extreme case the hosts are not being ranked on quality or support or uptime or reputation or any of those things that you are looking for, these review sites are ranking hosts solely by how much they pay in referral fees.  A web host that pays more will get higher on the list than a site that pays less, and a quality host that provides good quality service but doesn’t pay referral fees would not be listed at all.

So many "review" sites are actually paid advertising for the hosts that are listed on the site.  The "reviews" listed are there to justify the ranking and have nothing to do with determining the ranking.  Nowhere on the site will is actually say this though, that would ruin the illusion of neutrality.

In some cases the situation is even worse, there a few known cases where the webhost actually owns and runs the "independent review" site that ranks them far above all of the competition.

At Hosting Scorecard.com we are determined to provide good, neutral evaluations of web hosts without giving preferential treatment to anyone for any reason.

We do this by using methods that are not subject a single person’s opinion but rather compile everyone’s opinion to get a consensus. Over 150,000 opinions a week to be precise. 

See our How page for info on how it works.