Hello

We're still a new host and trying to get us of the ground, by doing a bit of scouting for the best hosting directory to market with. I was wondering if anybody have some success stories they'd like to share, or campaigns that have been running good with this particular hosting directory?

Also, which is the biggest? Tophosts, Hostindex??

Thanks in advance

Top 5 are:

Tophosts.com
Webhostdir.com
Hostsearch.com
HostIndex.com
TheWhir.com

Also ispcheck.com have been around for a long time and claim very high traffic levels, although i havent seen them indexed that highly in the search engines.

I wouldnt rate tophosts that highly, at least to deal with. They continued our banner (which we got poor results from to begin with) 2 months beyond what we originally paid and signed a contract for without notifying us until afterwards, and are now trying to force us to shell out $8k by threatening to give us a bad credit rating.

-Brendan

Don't they use any kind of insertion order to prevent them over running ad campaigns?

Hi René,

As a start up company I would suggest you stay away from HostIndex and TopHosts as their prices are overpriced and extremely high, you don't want to put all your eggs into one basket for something that is not proven to work for your business.

TheWhir is not quite a directory in it's own right but they do have a sister site that could suit you.

I think your best bet are the other two directories listed above.

Originally posted by HRBrendan
I wouldnt rate tophosts that highly, at least to deal with. They continued our banner (which we got poor results from to begin with) 2 months beyond what we originally paid and signed a contract for without notifying us until afterwards, and are now trying to force us to shell out $8k by threatening to give us a bad credit rating.

-Brendan

I was talking about traffic not quality :)

Well on the note of traffic TheWhir will probably rank the lowest out of the five but you could still get value for money out of a campaign there.

Rene,

If you're looking for the biggest directory it's going to be subjective to your criteria. Hosts listed? Number of hosts advertising? Most pages? Most articles?

personally, I think nearly all of the hosting directories have become unreliable, due to the amount of influence companies that pay big $$$ have on the directory...


that said, Webhostdir.com, Hostsearch.com, HostIndex.com would be my picks if i had to pick a directory....

Thanks a lot for the comments, much appriciated.

I think I would personally go with the hosting directories listed at the top of the major search engines for the reason that they probably get the most traffic. You have to ask yourself how people find hosting companies in the first place. I think if I look back now and I wanted to find a host, I would probably go to Google or Yahoo and perform a search for web hosting or some variation thereof.

Get them to guarantee you a certain number of clicks for your ad, and compare the prices around. Go where they guarantee you the best bang for your buck.

-Brendan

Which sort of campaigns have you had success with in the past? And by using which host index site?

Don't sacrafice a cheaper per click price over targeted clicks...

If a company (for example, google... even though they are expensive)

You pay them per click for targeted advertising.

There are many places (example: webhostingtalk.com) that you can place a banner on and only pay per click (or pay for 1,000 clicks... etc) and that is a lot more targeted.. Then having your banner pop-up on a random no ones site... :)

The comment about going with whatever directory is top of the search engines makes a lot of sense.

After that go with the one that has the cheapest advertising - they are all pretty much the same, none of the ad based directories are much better than any of the others - they all follow the same basic path - so to say which is better than any other is a bit meaningless.

Probably worth to advertise on a few of those though because - they frustrate the consumer so much that the consumer is bound to jump from one to the other