Foreign Perspectives

There seem to be as many sites reviewing hosting sites as there are hosting sites to be reviewed so perhaps it’s no surprise that just about any hosting service can find itself at the top 10 of the listings somewhere.

The sheer number of hosting services available is just amazing too. Whilst I was looking for a new hosting service I came across one or two that seemed to list hundreds of services. Although it’s not the most comprehensive, Website Hosting Jury lists almost 600 which should perhaps give you some idea of how great the choice is these days.

What’s not so evident is how one might choose the “best”. Most of those on WHJ have only one review which I dropped immediately from my shortlist but even just counting those with more than 50 reviews still leaves 24. Many of those in the top 10 actually have quite bad ratings which isn’t a good sign as they have from 80 through to 220 reviews each.

Of those top 24, there are relatively few that combine good economy with good service (if good marks on WHJ can be said to indicate good service): U2-web, Polur Net, RealWebHost, Integra-Net, ICD Soft, BlurStorm, LunarPages, Banana Hosting and HostGator. We need a lot of addon domains which narrows that list down to IntegraNet, LunarPages and HostGator of which we went with LunarPages on the basis that IntegraNet at $32/year sounded a little too cheap and HostGator at $10/month was a little too expensive. Having said that, I’d be quite tempted to start using IntegraNet as our backup host at some point (you can get both IntegraNet and LunarPages for less than it costs for HostGator) and were we only running personal sites, I’d have gone for it as the main host.