A little bit of self promotion never hurt anyone...

Well, stage 1 is complete - http://www.findsp.com is completely bug-free, fully functional control center, and the client version.. well, you gotta see it to beleive it!

So, if you are a hosting company - Add your information to our site, and get promoted BIG TIME: http://www.findsp.com/Hosting/HostCenter/Signup.asp

Besides the directory, reviews, Press releases, glossary, polls, tutorials and interviews, we have many other features planned for next week: You'll have the ability to add a Virtual Tour of your company facilities, schedule interviews automatically, and if you wish to sell your hosting company you'll be able to do it through our site...

Now maybe I'm wrong but I don't think our dir is just another web hosting resource one can igonre :)

anyways, looking forward to hear all your comments, bad or good things etc etc. I like watching people get upset in this forum over nothing.. so here you go :)

Cheers!

Very nice site. As promised the interface was pretty slick. I was able to add our information in just a couple of minutes. That is pretty refreshing after dealing with some of the other web hosting directories, which are either slow, poorly designed, require a lengthy approval process, or sign you up to a newsletter without your permission.

Take care,

Brian

Hey Lonny,

OK, I have to ask. So how are you unique? :) Site looks great!

Chat later,

Theres nothing unique about it, in fact theres nothing unique about any of the directorys, and I dont care what anyone says 99% of the ratings on 99% of the dir. are paid for their top spots.

You know what would be nice and what would be a unique directory, would be ones that dont let hosts such as ***** and other hosting compansy with bad reputations advertise on their directory.

I mean god even at this findsp.com place thats supposed to be so unique, has ***** as the fourth host on the page in their dedicated server index, what kind of a message does this send to findsp.com's customers. The owner of findsp.com has a morall obligation, to his customers, IE the browsers of his website. Why would someone want to promote a company who is so terrible??

Thats my feelings anyways, im sure im about ready to get tons of hate mail :)

After ranting I thought I should at least throw in some thoughts on the site, I like how its laid out and its very easy to view and nav, thumbs up for that....

There are very, very, very few media/information sources (newspaper, magazine, tv, radio, web, etc) that are completely objective.

Web sites such as FindSP.com aren't free to run. Someone has to pay for it. Its only reasonable to have them do what they need to do to make money to help keep the site running.

Now, what level of bias it buys the advertisers is really the question. I don't know with FindSP.com, but even mainstream sites such as Yahoo.com, Lycos.com, Cnet.com, etc show bias (sometimes extreme bias) towards there advertisers. (Cnet.com is particularly guilty of that crime.)

I guess what I am trying to say is that unless someone is running a truly advertising free site which is wholly personally funded, there either is or will be potential for bias towards their advertisers.

Brian

There are about a 1000 reputable host that will pay for advertising too, just because they omit ***** doesnt mean that they cant run a site..

Again, reputation is subjective. Should every media outlet research the prospective buyers extensively to ensure that they are a "good" company? Well, it would be nice, but it isn't going to happen. Its too expensive, and they could alienate the very businesses that produce their revenue stream.

Imagine MTV saying they won't run Nike commercials because the company sells cheap shoes made in sweat shops in Asia. Its a very close analogy to what you are suggesting.

Take care,

Brian

Im not saying they need to anylize every advertiser, but if there is a particular site who stands out in providing the worst of the worst service and even fraudulant behaviour, thats the type of site that should be avoided. Its like NBC advertising drugs, would they do it? No, why because they know it bad, wheil the analogy is extreme, its still presents a valid point.

Hello All, I'm happy our site started a discussion like this :) it's giving us a lot of promotion, so keep talking people... Now I'm going to answer one at a time, so here we go:

bteeter - Thank you for your kind words, we are doing our best, I hope we'll be able to promote your company as much as possible, and I agree with you on the ad situation, and please let me point this out - we will never make frad recommendations - we have our own ways to check a host!
BTW thanks for comparing our site with MTV, it's not that big, but hey, we're young and we still got some time!

MikePalmer - Hiya Mike how is it going, BTW any news on that matter we discussed earlier? :) how are we unique? Well besides all the new exciting ORIGINAL featuires our site has, we are about to add much much more... I'm not going to tell you all of them, but you'll have to sign up to our newseletter, or to visit our site in a few days, but beleive me, it's first time on such a site - I just wonder how long will it take before someone would copy us.

cbaker17 - thanks for the thumbs us comment, our site has no misleading links, we have all the info and the users may choose, if youi want to remove the banners as well, I'll tell you what, if you could find someone who'll pay us a monthly fee that we would have got from the banners, I'm willing to remove them, how does that sound? impossible? unrealistic? I think so as well :) so until we'll find some other funding solution, I'm afraid you'll have to see those banners and maybe even click on a few :0

Thank you very much for all of you talking about our site, we have many features and that includes the forum: http://www.findsp.com/forum

So we would appreciate some talks there as well if possible....

Thank you all so much again


Sorry for interrupting... keep talking people!

Hey, I still think that since it is an open, free host directory, that all hosts should be allowed to be on it. Even *****. As much as I hate *****s and would really like to see them go out of business, I still feel that they should be allowed on the directories. Its almost like discriminating against *****s because they have bad service.

I think that someone should really start up a directory that has no advertising and is unbaisest in their comments. Oh well, maybe there will be one like that someday.

Jim

Has anyone read the new issue of PC World? ***** as a two page ad there. Here is an excerpt :

..."That power translates to competitive advantage for *****'s customers, giving them better tools to run their e-businesses. Perhaps that's why ***** has the lowest "churn rate" in the industry - once you're a customer you tend to stay - or why ***** for the past 33 months has consistenly ranked among the top five Web hosting companies out of the 16,000 around the globe by CNET's Ultimate Web Host List, HostIndex.com, and Web Host DIrectory."....

Hmmmm, now I've not been a customer of theirs but if I didn't know any better I might actually believe what they advertise as true.


Evil! EVIL!

I truely wish they have another DNS server failure and they are down for 3 more days, like in 1999. Man, they bull$%i* so much, its not funny anymore. Someone who doesnt know any better, would go in and pay $50.00/month for basic hosting and get screwed. *****s are losers!!!!

Jim

Hey Lonny,

I think I may have something for you on that other topic. Look for me this weekend online and see if we can hook up.

Later,

Hiya

I'm not sure what to tell you about ***** we never tested them and if they will advertise on our site we probably won't reject them, however we never give away recommendations if we don't really mean them.

Mike: Thanks a lot, if I can't reach you please contact me by email if possible.

Thanks again

Keep talking people...

Lonny,

Having ***** as an advertiser will do you more harm than good.

In December 1999, the month of when all their problems started, they we're one of our top advertisers. When it hit the fan, their tech support was taken offline, due to the volume of email they recieved.

This then resulted in our server going down, after recieving in excess of 20,000 emails over a 5 day period. (which included Xmas)

Needless to say we pulled their ads! Since then they have gone from bad to worse.......

I see theyre still promoting in their offline advertising that we gave them an award. It was in November 1999!!!

As cbaker17, said

" There are about a 1000 reputable host that will pay for advertising too, just because they omit ***** doesnt mean that they cant run a site."

Thanks for the info mate, hmm, well I'd like to investigate more about ***** but I agree in general...

Cheers!

If your looking into researching *****, you might want to start here:

http://www.badwebhost.com

Thank you very Much for the information James, it is really kind of you - I'd apreciate hearing any further tips you might have - after all - you've been here for over 3 years..


Thanks again

Hello All

Didn't want to start a new thread, so I made the post here


================================================================
May Discount
================================================================
Is your listing lost in the crowd?
Get the skyscraper for only $25 CPM - for orders made by the end of May. The skyscraper
receives the highest CTR rate on our site, some advertisers receive 2.5%-3.5%.

Please contact sales@findsp.com if you are interested!
================================================================

For all those who asked themselves what makes us special :)

well, in a few days we will be launching the Web Host Marketplace!!!!!!!!!!!!! you'll be able to shop for almost anything related to web hosting, servers, books, services, software... you name it!!!

We will also be selling some of our stuff - like hats, cups, tshirts etc. :)

Looking forward hearing your suggestions.

The opening is in a few days so meanwhile I'd like to know what things you'd like to see in the marketplace.

Thanks.


Besides that we also released a message board available here: http://130.94.137.116

the domain will be availble within a few days.


We have many other things planned for this month, so we'll keep you posted.