I was thinking of making a site for testing web hosting companies support. For $5/month I would test the hosts who signed up a few random days each month, then give ratings and then an overall rating. If the overall rating is 10/10 then they get a special image for there site. Then show the top 10 hosts with the best support. Then when customers think about the support they will get they can check out my site. Think its a good idea?

Thankyou,
Luke

If you think you can make it work, then go for it. Sounds decent to me - although something like this probably has been done before, I haven't heard of one so I'd say there is still room for another.

Luke

If you think you can make it work, then go for it. Sounds decent to me - although something like this probably has been done before, I haven't heard of one so I'd say there is still room for another.

Luke

Thanks for the encouraging comment :D

Ok - waste of hosts time though in my opinion.

Ok - waste of hosts time though in my opinion.

y? Live Support or Support is a key feature for hosting. Would you go with a company that has a poor live support or support?

Since you're not a customer (and have no intention of becoming one), it's wasting the company's time to answer your tickets. If they are paying support personnel, you are also wasting their money. I say let the buyer check out the host for themselves.

bear - exactly my point. Also, how do you plan on implementing it without the support person knowing it's you?

So, sort of like auditing support?

I suppose it's not the same as being paid to test restuarants, etc.

Another thought here: I personally don't give end support to those that aren't clients already, unless it's presales or billing questions. I have no interest in supplying tech support to non-customers.
If you're testing support (and not sales) how many will answer your questions without you being a customer?

I like the idea, but also agree that few businesses will take any notice of your tickets if you aren't a customer, perhaps if you were to sign up for a month at different hosts and try out the whole service it would work a lot better, and you would be able to give your readers a better review of the business. Consider this, a hosting company with an excellent support team, so you give them a 10/10 review, but since you havent hosted with them you find that a reader comments that they may have great support BUT only have a 90% uptime so really are a bit crap! what are you going to do when people start questioning the reviews as your not reviewing the package as a whole?

Like I said, good idea, maybe needs some changes though..

It was just an idea lol

I do not think you would be able to charge monthly to test them out. If the owner really wanted to he could jump online and test his own team.
A big problem is finding a way to actually become credable and have your cert worth something. A few times a month does not prove to me that the company has great support.

Completely a waste of time I am afraid, and to be honest - there is many many flaws in your idea that simply wouldn't make it a successful project at all.

It was just an idea lol

I think people realize that...

Perhaps a better thing to do would be to create a useful analytical tool, like monitoring uptime, periods of lag, number of domains hosted on server, and other varoius statistics. Provide this in a list and draw conclusions and ratings in a sensible manner from there. Consumers would be interested in your site and thus would come there, at which point you could make money through referrals and ads. Likewise hosts eventually may see value in being monitored by your service in hopes of being seen as a quality, reputable provider. This has been done before but if you create an exceptional analytical tool, then there is definately a market for such a niche.

Hmm... how about charging consumers looking for webhosting a fee ($10, $25, or $50) for a report on the support response of web hosts.

You would have to maintain accounts at all the sites you include in your report and you would do this without the host knowing you are a "special" client.

Assuming you had enough consumer interest, you could cover your costs and make a fair profit.

Of course, this means a consumer would have to pay for this information. Theoretically, knowing in advance whether a host had good support or not should be worth a lot more since going with a poor host means lost time, effort, potential lost sales, etc.

I suspect that all those people constantly looking for "cheapest web hosting" and then complaining about the poor support they receive "I've had 7 web hosts in the last year and they've all been poor..." might not be willing to pay a dime for your report, of course, because of their price shopping only mentality.

Perhaps a better thing to do would be to create a useful analytical tool, like monitoring uptime, periods of lag, number of domains hosted on server, and other varoius statistics.

How could you possibly list the domains per server? The only way is to list what the host tells you, however there is absolutely no way to verify that, so what's to stop someone with 2000 sites per server saying they only have 100?

Ex:

http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/?hostname=66.83.79.84

...you can use this tool to find some interesting stuff, such as how many sites are on an IP.

such as how many sites are on an IP.

Actually, you are very wrong.

That does not tell you about domain alias or subdomains, does not tell you about people on the machine with a dedicated IP address and it does not tell you about country specific extensions.

The figures that tools shows are way off and are useless for showing on a site to try and guage how many sites are on a server. I could have 500 .co.uk domains on a server and that site would show that the machine was empty.