Foreign Perspectives

One of the ongoing hassles with running a website is that no matter how much effort you put into selecting the perfect hosting service at the outset, chances are that your needs will change, the service on offer will change or if both those stay the same then the offerings from other hosting services will change.

Whatever the reason, you’re sure to find that it’s worthwhile re-examining your web hosting from time to time.

I generally have a look around about once a year and it’s surprising just how dramatic the changes to the top 10 spots have changed in the comparison services. To be fair, many of the new entrants in the top 10 are relatively newly launched services and that’s something to bear in mind when you’re looking at the number of comments contributing to the ratings: it’s quite a different matter to have a thousand great comments and a dozen bad ones than to have just a dozen good comments. One downside of the WebHostingGeeks site is that they don’t provide this information so, for example, I don’t know how significant the one really bad comment currently sitting at the top of the JustHost is. That said, when you do know how many reviews went into the rating calculation you have the problem that perceptions of hosting services changes over time so for a service that’s been running for a number of years the oldest comments aren’t always relevant eg if someone complains about the stingy amount of storage on offer chance are that it’ll have changed dramatically over the course of a few years.

What’s quite handy is the categorisation of hosts into top 10 listings for multiple domains, for blogs, etc. Although many services appear in lots of the top 10 listings sometimes you can get quite a bargain for, say, blog hosting that’s much better than a generic top 10 service.

Perhaps the most significant development is that some services offer moneyback guarantees with no time limit. That can only be good news for us customers and should help to keep the hosting companies on their toes in keeping up service levels.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Related posts:

1. Does it really matter who you host your site with?
2. Is it still the case that you only get what you pay for?
3. The October courses open for registration with the Open University

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under Blogging, Computing, Internet, Miscellaneous, Science & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.