My blog first started with a review of Webhostingstuff’s top 25 hosts.

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/webhostingstuff-com/michael-low.html

As of last week I completed a review of all 25 hosts that pay webhostingstuff for their positioning.  I honestly had hoped to finish before the end of June.  But in the end I found there was a lot more to most of these hosts that I would have imagined.  Some of the most damming details came directly from the staff of the hosting companies.  Some took far deeper digging and rethinking of what to look for as it was not always the same with each host.

I wanted to prove that the hosts were not worthy of being in the top.  Little did I suspect that it was far worse then I first assumed, and perhaps I should have started this blog a lot sooner then when I did.  Even though its becoming growing knowledge that this company that claims:

“Unlike some dubious “top 10 hosting sites”  that promote web hosts based on affiliate commissions, our fair and honest ranking system helps visitors find the real top web hosting companies.”

The same person that owns webhostingstuff.com, also owns hostaz.com a site that is based on Affiliate Commissions.  The name of the owner is Michael Low a resident of Singapore. Hostaz.com, webhostingstuff.com is based off of paid per rank.  Which is far worse then any top 10 thats based off of affiliate commission.

The summary that comes to mind with webhostingstuff

Some websites were put over night Ioxhost comes to mind

Two of the hosts were owned by the same company: Ipage and Fatcow.  Meaning I need to look further into The Endurance International Group, Inc.

There were a lot of hosts offering over the top affilate payments. ipage, fatcow, hostgator, site5,….. pretty much half the sites I reviewed.  Many whose own affiliates that drowned out negative feed back only to benefit the hosts.

Some are out of date in their design netmar, LFC hosting

Two hosts were not even worth the effort, Mochahost (terrible customer service behavior) and 2GB Hosting (7 day guarantee).

Is there any truth with webhostingstuff?

The one thing that I am almost certain they do not modify is the uptime monitoring.  With cloud.bg and i7net.net (not an actually May 2010 host, but June 2010),  Uptime which should have been a factor in rather a host belonged in thetop 25 position.   But even the uptime is suspect, as the hosts that had bad uptime are were lower levels of the top 25.  Perhaps future monitoring of their top 25 will tell me more.

Why do people still trust webhostingstuff?

This is almost like arguing with my mother, often when it comes to an argument such as gender is determined by the male of our species (go Y chromosome), she will quote some one she found on the internet as evidence that I am wrong.   Some reason those sayings my grandmother, her mother did not come to mind to her.  Buyer Beware, You get what you pay for, there is a sucker born every minute.  I guess you could say the pearls of wisdom jumped a generation.  But there are those out there that think of search engines as fact finders.  That is what webhostingstuff is counting on, and they think a few claims of being fair and honest are supposed to make up for the lack of truth.  But this is from the same company whose own interguity page:

http://www.webhostingstuff.com/our_reviews.html

They claim:

To build a fair and honest ranking system, ranking is always performed automatically by the system – free of human interference.

However just below that is the very sentence that tears apart that very statement:

Human editors are also needed to maintain the high level of integrity of our trusted reviews. Webmasters and system administrators are needed for the smooth running of this large site.

No matter what I do there will always be someone that trusts webhostingstuff regardless of what they do.  Needless to say I am not done, every new host that signs on to webhostingstuff is subject to my review.