Web Hosting Review

Introduction to Web Hosting

Web hosting services enable people and organizations to upload and maintain websites on the Internet. Hosting companies provide space on servers (special computers) that house the files and pages that comprise a website. They have professional-speed Internet connections. You may also be interested in our related reports on domain registration and web design software, both of which you'll also need to get your personal or small business website up and running.

We found hundreds of websites devoted to recommending web hosting services. The problem is that while sites like WebHostingBluebook.com and Sharphosts.com include top-ten lists of web hosts and links to reviews, those reviews merely consist of just a brief description, with no evidence of testing and no reasons given for how editors reached conclusions. Furthermore, there's no information about who's behind these websites, which makes them unreliable as review sources. A profusion of these types of unreliable websites makes it especially tricky to find objective reviews of web hosting services.

We found the most credible reviews of web hosting services at Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide. However, we are troubled that their top-rated hosts are rarely reviewed elsewhere and fare poorly in some user reviews. HostSearch.com and VistaInter.com are the best sites for user reviews. Still, each site has many reviews for some services that have few or no reviews on the other site. Most other sites with user reviews have statistically insignificant numbers of reviews for most services. PC Magazine hasn't reviewed general hosts in years, and even its coverage of e-commerce hosts is more than two years old. Consumer Reports hasn't covered the topic either.

So to help identify the best services, we explored newspaper and magazine articles, Internet forums, blogs and other sources with unscreened user feedback. A combination of all sources reveals qualitative differences between web-hosting services and allows some web hosts to rise above others in reliability, features, service and value.

We didn't find too much evidence that many web hosting services are a downright poor choice, yet some service receive below average comments from customers. Infinology.com (starting at *est. $7 per month) has received some black marks from subscribers. Infinology is ranked as the best service by Web-Hosting-Reviews.org and Upperhost.com. The vast majority of current and former customers take issue with that. A consistent theme appears in user reviews -- problems with downtime, unresponsive customer service and database failures. And the complaints seem to have become worse in the past year or two as opposed to getting better.

More than half the users at VistaInter.com give Infinology a thumbs-down rating. It is the only service among the 18 we checked to have a majority of negative reviews. More than 30 Web Hosting Jury.com users give Infinology an average rating of 1.9 (five is high). Twice as many Web Hosting Ratings.com users give it an average rating of 2.5 (ten is high).

One e-commerce hosting business receives an above average amount of negative customer feedback. Yahoo! Small Business (starting at *est. $40 per month + 1.5% transaction fee) was selected as an Editor's Choice by PC Magazine in January 2005, and it was recommended by Business Week. As with Infinology, the quality of web hosting service by Yahoo! Small Business may have progressively declined. All the PC Magazine readers who responded to its review give Yahoo! web hosting the lowest possible rating of "terrible." Reviews on the specialty review sites confirm that Yahoo! has earned more foes than fans with its service. One blogger's complaint is typical -- that Yahoo! accidentally deleted an entire web hosting service account without warning or cause.