Does anyone know where I can find an unbiased directory of web hosting company rankings?..

Unbiased only please.

I dont wnat those like hostindex where you pay for your rank

LOL, I wish there was one I knew of..but it is all about money nowadays ;)

Also, I do think one source could rate the 20 "best" web hosts out there. There are a lot of good web hosts that all offer something different that people like. It all depends what a person is looking for.

Tcoy~

I don't think that is hard to do.... why can't a panel of people get together.. (none of the member is in hosting related business) gather some information from exisiting host directories.. set out criterias.. sit down.. and analyze ..and make it availble for consumers?..

Well, you could make a top 20 with criteria being what *most* people would want in basic hosting I guess. At least 50% probably want nearly the same thing (if not much more - 85% ???). They want xMB's with decent bandwidth, good support, for the best price. In fact, I doubt the majority even fully understand most of that, and just wants to be told who to go with (and this you can base on the usual basic needs and features). Flip side: anyone actually looking for this type of info, might be a bit more educated as to the lingo and thus might want more specific features. I don't know...

Sure can't hurt to give it a go :) I'm guessing that even if #1 didn't have the specific feature the person wanted, #7 might just by chance, and that would still be good info for them.

The trouble with ranking sites, I suspect, is that once you set it up for a few months, then you'll suddenly get thousands of dollars thrown at you by certain hosts wanting to put prominent ads on your site, or (even worse) sneakily meddle with the rankings. It's very hard to remain unbiased when you have such pressure against you - would you rather try and persist with unbiased rankings or would you take the $5,000 being offered to you?

Of course, 'unbiased' is only a term in the eye of the beholder. What one may term as an 'unbiased' site may well seem biased in another's.

Good idea DynastyHost!

Why doesn't someone get a few people together, and discuss setting up a ranking site?

There are already *plenty* of 'hosting directories' out there. Many of them already have a "top 10" or "top 20". However, you can see by the look of their sites (jam packed with ads) that being 100% unbiased is probably not their #1 concern.

If someone were to start an ad-free, non-profit site that provided honest rankings of web hosts, I'm sure it would grow to be quite popular.

Maybe even consider a ".org" domain name! :eek:

Matt
mlightner@site5.com

This is sick.. I'm gonna start this panel.. but I have to get out of the hosting bussienss don't I? :) hehe.. oh well.. hmm

can someone please do it then? :)

I'll support ya..

Heck, why not support Matt (Sysadmin)? That's why this forum and the site's here in the first place! :)

You can find such a ranking in two places











Fantasy Island and The Twilight Zone. :rolleyes:

Actually, it's highly unlikely any would be unbiased. The bias doesnt even have to be influenced by advertising. It could be other things that reflect the bias of the reviewer. For instance, they might have abias towards larger companies, or those that offer both Linux and NT, whereas the needs of some people will be better served by smaller companies, and some will prefer Linux over NT, while vice versa for still others.

There are just too many variables for any host ranking to be unbiased.

Duster,

Of course it's not possible to be completely unbiased... however there is a big gap between an honest effort and a total scam.

What I was referring to when I said "100% unbiased" was that the decision would not be influenced in any way by offerings from the companies themselves.

In addition, if you have a panel of people, the biases(is that a word?) of an individual person will most likely be outweighed by the opinion of the rest of the group.

It's a system of checks and balances.

Matt
mlightner@site5.com

Hi,

I am kind of new to web-hosting myself, so I can't exactly give any idea's of where to find an unbiased top 20... but I can recommend one company, and no, it's not me :)

http://www.webfusion.com - they're pretty good, I use them for some of my website's and their service is great, they setup co-located servers in like 15 minutes after you place an online order! it's great.

Cheers :D

wow.. setup co-located servers in 15 minutes after placing the order? hmm did you put your server on a rocket and shipped it to them?

wow.. setup co-located servers in 15 minutes after placing the order? hmm did you put your server on a rocket and shipped it to them?

No... they use Fedex's "Priority Co-lo" delivery. :D

15 minutes would be quite an accomplishment... what, you can't do that Matt? *winky winky*

I am sure he meant dedicated server ... but even that would be a small feat ... unless they have spare servers lying around

David

Back to the original topic: how many hosting companies are there? 5,000? 10,000? I have no idea, but there's no way you're going to be able to able to give them all equal consideration. It's completely unrealistic to think that there really is such a thing as "the best host in the world," isn't it? So isn't it equally unrealistic to think that you can have a "real" top 20?

Will you really be able to reach a concensus? Look right here in this forum: a simpler question: who's the best provider of dedicated servers? Dialtone? VDI? Alabanza? UltraSpeed? Even approaching with this group's biases is there a concensus for which is the best?

By "this group's biases," by the way, I mean that the people who hang out here tend to talk about, think about, and recommend that small group of companies. People recommend them whether they've used them or not, because they've heard good things about them here. Yet there are surely providers that none of the 547 registered users has even heard of.

So open it up to "virtual server" hosting companies. I won't even try to list them, but I'm sure I could come up with 20 that somebody, some number of people who are users of this forum will swear by. So which is the best? Which is number 2? Number 20?

OK, now consider EVERY HOSTING COMPANY IN THE WORLD!


Good luck!

Originally posted by JayC
Back to the original topic: how many hosting companies are there? 5,000? 10,000? I have no idea, but there's no way you're going to be able to able to give them all equal consideration. It's completely unrealistic to think that there really is such a thing as "the best host in the world," isn't it? So isn't it equally unrealistic to think that you can have a "real" top 20?

Will you really be able to reach a concensus? Look right here in this forum: a simpler question: who's the best provider of dedicated servers? Dialtone? VDI? Alabanza? UltraSpeed? Even approaching with this group's biases is there a concensus for which is the best?

By "this group's biases," by the way, I mean that the people who hang out here tend to talk about, think about, and recommend that small group of companies. People recommend them whether they've used them or not, because they've heard good things about them here. Yet there are surely providers that none of the 547 registered users has even heard of.

So open it up to "virtual server" hosting companies. I won't even try to list them, but I'm sure I could come up with 20 that somebody, some number of people who are users of this forum will swear by. So which is the best? Which is number 2? Number 20?

OK, now consider EVERY HOSTING COMPANY IN THE WORLD!


Good luck!





I agreee with JayC. There are tooo many hosts out there for an individual or a panel to examine. There are too many bieng added to that number every day. No panel will be able to cope with the speed at which the number of hosts are growing.

It also depends on what the user wonts. There are too many options and combinations. Extra Bandwidth cost, more space, less space, extra space, cgi, php, python, NT, Linux, freeBSD, response time, uptime, speed, reduntancy of connections etc etc. How does one categorise something like this? and then give commnets on it?

It is not something that is impossible. It is something that is impracticle.

I read somewhere, several months ago, that there were over 16,000 hosting companies.

Some of you have given valid reasons for the futility of any such rankings. There are just too many companies and too many variables for such a list to be feasible.

On top of all that, things can change rapidly.

Originally posted by kunal
[BIt also depends on what the user wonts. There are too many options and combinations. Extra Bandwidth cost, more space, less space, extra space, cgi, php, python, NT, Linux, freeBSD, response time, uptime, speed, reduntancy of connections etc etc. How does one categorise something like this? and then give commnets on it?[/B]

I will say this, and I think the feeling is shared among many who post here: Looking for a host is/was a horribly confusing task. Even if hosts didn't change their offerings, it still would be a nightmare. But, I don't think we are talking about looking at all of them. You really can't obviously.

I guess I'd have to agree... just looking at 1/2 the Alabanza hosts alone would take you about 200 years.

You could set it up to email listed hosts once every 3 months reminding them to update the plans themselves if they wish to continue being listed. If they have had no changes, then they could just log in to their account and save as is. This doesn't help with ranking them, but at least keeps the database reasonably up to date without being too much trouble for the hosts.

Back to the topic..

I think one can create say ..30 categories ...each categories will have a Top 20 Hosts.

one caegory might be Best Host Under 50 MB.. or Best Customer Support Host.. ect..

you can create as many categories as you wish.. that way it is easier for consumers to target the host that they want. say if my priority is customer support.. I would look under that category.

Originally posted by DynastyHost
Back to the topic..

I think one can create say ..30 categories ...each categories will have a Top 20 Hosts.

one caegory might be Best Host Under 50 MB.. or Best Customer Support Host.. ect..

you can create as many categories as you wish.. that way it is easier for consumers to target the host that they want. say if my priority is customer support.. I would look under that category.

But how will you categorize all the hosts in cyber space?? If you do a select few, you loose the ideals of the website! Don't you?

Originally posted by DynastyHost
you can create as many categories as you wish.. that way it is easier for consumers to target the host that they want. say if my priority is customer support.. I would look under that category. I think that would probably come closer to "doing it right" than any existing hosting directory does. BUT. I still can't possibly believe that (taking Duster's number) of the 16,000 web hosts there's any way you can realistically choose 20 that have, for example, the best customer support. Let alone that there is one host of the the 16,000 that is NUMBER 1 in customer support. I'd be willing to believe something along the lines of a 1,000-way tie for first place.

Same for price. If there are 16,000 hosts... OK, say you give up and don't try to come close to ranking them all. Rank only 1,000! Is there one that has lower prices than the other 999? If so, not for long -- because as soon as they're ranked, 500 will match the price.

You can't consider them all. You'll have to narrow it down. The directories we love to hate narrow it down by focusing on hosts that advertise with them. If you don't accept ads, you'll have to find another way to decide which segments of the hosting community you're going to include, and which you're going to exclude. And as soon as you do that, the value of the project to the consumer diminishes.

Well you could always do some eliminated :-) Some people do not like resellers so if you do not list reseller's just the actual hosts then that may elimitate about 10,000 hosts right there...hehe. Of course when you have a reseller giving better support than the host they resell for it would probably cause some problems.

Tcoy~

Heh heh, well I guess this is why the "pay for the top spot" host index system works so well. Takes all the calculation and figuring out of the picture :) Blah.

Originally posted by Chicken
Heh heh, well I guess this is why the "pay for the top spot" host index system works so well. Takes all the calculation and figuring out of the picture :) Blah. Exactly! :)

I don't know. I appreciate the intent here. But what it comes down to for me, I guess, is that I really don't believe that there is such a thing as the "best host" or even a real top 20. Further, the whole industry is so volatile that a favorite host this week might not be next week (spell it with me... A... L... A... ). And, as a long-time consultant there's another situation I've faced from time to time: a client (or a friend, or a random stranger I strike up a conversation with!) knows of a hosting company (that I've never heard of) and wants to know if they're worthwhile. Maybe it's a friend of the person's friend, or a business associate. I don't want to say that company is good, because I don't know. But I can't say "they're not listed on any hosting index, so they must be bad," because I know that whether they are listed or not -- whether or not they are widely known -- is completely irrelevant to how good they are.

I think the best thing that can be done for a hosting shopper is to educate them on what to look for and send them out as knowledgeable consumers asking the right questions. Teach them to fish, so to speak.

To summarise, I think we all got the point that I stated at the beginning : it is very, very hard to maintain a completely unbiased directory, as you'll always have other competing pressures on you to set up 'this top 20 in terms of set up fees', 'this top 20 in terms of uptime', etc. etc. Throw in the advertising dollars and it's even worse.

The only way an 'unbiased' directory could come close to working is to set up a database, get the hosts to update their plans often, have no rankings or ads of any sort, and drive traffic to a forum (much like WHT here) and set up a community of 'old hands' who can help newbies out. It's not impossible, it's just bloody hard.

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
No... they use Fedex's "Priority Co-lo" delivery. :D

You know Matt, I thought about using them once, but they couldn't guarantee me the 15 min. setup time. They must have changed that rule. :D

I don't think any ranking system could be unbiased. I mean, someone starts with a good idea, then gets $5000 thrown at them from someone like burlee.com (used as an example only) and of course they will be a little biased.

or

They setup a system where people can rank them on diff. categories with a 1 to 5. Then you have fake people coming out of the wood work that posts 5's on every topic.

If you want unbiased, pick 100 people who know NOTHING about hosting to look at the different hosts. People like your mom, brother, aunt, grandmother, next door neighbor, etc. Then you might get unbiased.

Here's the major flaw and deficiency in any list of hosts. Suppose there was a database, as BC proposed, and all 16,000+ hosts were included. They updated their own offerings and so any comparison was up to date.

Let's assume none of them offered something they didn't have in an effort to get higher up the long list.

Here's the flaw: all of the present rankings, even those not influenced by advertising, are based on technical offerings. Many of us have seen companies that do have good technical offerings, but their customer service is terrible.

For me, AIT (aitcom.net) was such a company. They are the black hole of hosting and could advertise "our tech support and customer service departments are so dense that no thought gets through to them". Many thers, here and elsewhere, have had their own bad experiences. All you have to do is substitute the name of thousands of other companies for AIT.

For a really good listing to work, it would have to have a wide enough base of customers and former customers giving specific detail about their experiences. We've already seen the pitfalls of that here. When new company names are announced, new names of posters appear and they support that company. In many cases, it is someone advertising their company.

Imagine that kind of boosting on a list the scope of 16,000+ companies, even assuming you could get enough participation from customers.

Additionally, any such list will reflect the biases of the people who compose it. Unless they think to ask all the right questions (other than technical stuff alone), the list will be inadequate.

Ultimately, the best recourse is still for each person to learn what they should ask and search for a host based on their own needs.

I think in addition to technical excellence should also be a customer service ranking. This could be done by allowing people to post reviews on the hosts. Obviously some hosts would put in false reviews, but I think with enough traffice and reviews the system might actually be useful.

David