How do you find out the answers to these question?
What level is a hosting company?
Are they resellers? With no equipment?
They have equipment but it's located in their home?
If they are buying rack space how do you know they have access and can repair problems?
Are they really connected to fast backbone and what is their real bandwidth capabilities?

Why isn't there a hostsellect service that gives all this info in one convenient database?
Every host rating site seems to be run by a hosting company and
using it to generate
business for themselves.

Besides this forum where can one go to find a decent host service, and read what users are saying?

Originally posted by mrmax
How do you find out the answers to these question?

Email and ask them mate.

Cheers

Gary

Yeah asking them is about the only way to get this info.. Also a lookup of there ip addresses and maybe check there nameservers some reseller bo not even bother to setup there own so they might point to the company that they purchased the reseller plan from.. thats about all you can do..

Well I had a better question.

How can a webhosting company prove the answers it supplies to these questions are true?

Some companies hide information so well, that I dont think you really can tell. Unless of course word of mouth.

You're never going to get around that situation unfortunately. Most of the questions above one can easily find out for themselves. Some questions a host isn't obliged to answer, but those that they are...we can only hope that most answer honestly.

Threaten them with the WHT Wrath. :)

Gary

Research. lots and lots of research. even then that doesn't prove much. Hosting is getting to be like gambling.

look at worldcom, Qwest, Genuity, UUnet nice big hugh hosts with stock even. Heck I think I even seen C-I- Host stock traded on the market

1. You should balance the risks vs the price
2. Check the location of the host
3. [U.S] Head to the State government website look for the DBA, LLC, or what ever Then pull the record and check the names and addresses of the business
4. whois report
5. tracert
6 who's the above line providers
7. check with the BBB
8. go with word of mouth
9. how long have they been in business
10. do the prices look reasonable? average bandwidth per month per GB is $2.50 to $3.00
11. look for free trials with no cash up front. run a script on the status of the server. is it overloaded? is it slow? what's installed?

about all I can say or think of at the moment, hope this helps some

Traceroutes do a good job to show what kind of provider they use. It can also show if they are using someone else's network or if they are operating on their own network.

Looking up the IP addresses in the ARIN database will show you the owner of the IP addresses, most likely will show the backbone provider's name instead of the actually company using the IP, but in some cases it is rather revealling.

Look in their terms of service, some of them actually reveal who their reseller provider is, or even worse, they copy their reseller providers terms of service word for word.

See if they offer dedicated servers, usually hosts that are reselling for another provider do not offer dedicated servers or colo services.

Those are just a few that I can think of off the top of my head.

Originally posted by OllieVH
See if they offer dedicated servers, usually hosts that are reselling for another provider do not offer dedicated servers or colo services.


We are direct client of Internap and have our own equipments/servers/rack/etc, but not yet offering dedicated servers (only custome request). So, I hope that's not the deciding factor :)

See if they own their own netblock, check if their servers are in the netblock of a dedicated server/colo company like rackshack

Originally posted by FHDave


We are direct client of Internap and have our own equipments/servers/rack/etc, but not yet offering dedicated servers (only custome request). So, I hope that's not the deciding factor :)

This is true and that is why I said usually. After reviewing what I said, I realized that my company falls in the same category. We own all of our servers and place them in a regional data center but do not currently offer dedicated solutions but are definetely not reselling another hosts services.

I guess I should have thought that comment out a little more :)