I cant tell which hosts are really good, because I think there's so many fake messages (ie ADS) How do you tell??

Originally posted by Qill
I cant tell which hosts are really good, because I think there's so many fake messages (ie ADS) How do you tell??

That's easy: Anytime someone says anything nice about a host, it's obviously an ad :D.

Seriously, there really is not an exact science to determining whether praise for a host is real, or fabricated, but after you have been around a while you develop a feel for it, and can usually spot fakers.

Real people tend to make posts like

I just wanted to say that I've been very happy with $HOSTNAME so far. In the past four months since I signed up, there has only been one very short outage, and every time I've needed help with something (like one of my cgi scripts) they've been very supportive.

Hosting companies pretending to be real people tend to make posts like

Hey everyone, $HOSTNAME is really great! I just signed up with them, and for $4.95/month I'm getting
200MB of disk space
10GB of bandwidth
5 subdomains
CGI/ASP/JSP/PHP and shell access
99.9% uptime guarantee
24/7 toll-free support

ethics... something not really wide spread in our business.....

just my 2c

Hosting companies posting good words about themselves usually have a very low post count. And how recent a poster signed up with this forum is also a good indicator.

Originally posted by Qill
I cant tell which hosts are really good, because I think there's so many fake messages (ie ADS) How do you tell??
And you can just imagine how fun that makes our jobs, heh. You'd like to think that every post is genuine, but realistically, that probably isn't the case. As a new member, you don't know who to really trust, but as was said, newer members lack credibility (not because they are evil new members, just because they are new). Lack of creditibilty isn't a bad thing, it is just something that has to be built up over time.