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Web Hosting Review Sites Exposed

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:48:06 +1100

Saw this video on YouTube the other day, which leads to this website that exposes dirty secrets of web hosting review sites.

It is basically preaching the same message that DreamHost blogged about almost 2 years ago. None of these web hosting review sites are reliable because top spots can usually be bought with monthly subscription fee. Either that or a hefty affiliation payout. Basically they should have renamed the top 10 hosting companies to the Top 10 Web Hosting Companies that Pay Me The Most. Funny that the site is hosted on GoDaddy, which quite often appears on those “top web hosting site” lists as well.

What About Paid Reviews?

I guess the same issue goes to many web hosting related articles/blog site as well, where sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether a review on a blog is genuine or not. Any money changed hands for this particular post? Are the links full of affiliation IDs? I was reading Daw Web Hosting Blog and Dimitar has pointed out an increasing number of paid-review blogs on web hosting, and those paid reviews can usually mislead consumers over purchasing decisions, as many people search for “<company name> review” thinking they got postive reviews from genuine customers.

I am not saying I am sinless in this department. I did a paid review a year ago on a UK hosting company when I tried out ReviewMe (although I can’t see any sale pitch in that article). As Dimitar said, I think doing those paid reviews might hurt the credibility of this site in the long run. I have since cancelled my ReviewMe account, and turned down many review requests — most are generic oversellers that offer nothing unique anyway.

Any Genuine Reviews Out There?

With paid listing and paid reviews littering the net, I am afraid to say that it can be almost impossible to find genuine reviews. Most website owners don’t write about them when things are smooth sailing so all the positive reviews ended up coming from the paid review sites.

One alternative is to search through Web Hosting Talk forums (where all the disgruntled customers whinged about their web hosting companies). Again, lots of negative reviews and sometimes I doubt how genuine some of the positive reviews are over there.

I guess there is no “The Best Host” where everyone raves about unconditionally. Do a bit of research making sure there are not too many negative reviews. Give them a try without committing too much up front. Make sure you do not purchase domain from the same place where you purchase hosting accounts. And this is important — do daily backups so you can move over to the next host if anything does go wrong…

Tech Hosting

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:13:52 +0000
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Our Review

When we can we will leave our own review of the company here. ...]

Why my site does not work on new host?

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:30:43 +0000

My website was working for years on the old host but now it does not work on new host. Why? This is one of annoyances that come up because some people fail to realize that there are just too many variables at function here. For a website to operate, there are many building blocks, e.g. ...]

Microsoft Hosting Summit - Exhibitor and Attendee Feedback

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:21:00 -0500

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an interview with Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's lead marketing manager for hosted services, where we gained some insight into the direction Microsoft is taking with its partners through events like its annual Hosting Summit.

On the other side of the spectrum are the partners themselves, and we caught up with a good variety of them at the event to really get a sense of what the overall experience was like for them (considering this event really IS mostly about them, right?). We particularly decided to focus on questions like why they decided to attend the event, what they thought about the information Microsoft was presenting to them and what value they felt Microsoft's summit brought to the hosting industry as a whole.

Overselling Illustrated - Toilet Bowls

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:46:09 +1100

Yesterday afternoon when I assisted my 3 1/2 year old daughter to go to the wee, she asked some interesting questions while sitting on the toilet bowl.

Daughter: “Daddy, why don’t we have one toilet for daddy, one toilet for mummy, one toilet for baby (my other daughter who is 10 month old) and another toilet for me?!”

Toilet Bowl Well. Because that will be excessive! We only have one toilet in a semi-detached house with 3 bedrooms (actually there is another toilet “at the back” that needs a bit of “maintenance” but we won’t go into all the smelly details here). However the chances that everyone needs to use the toilet at the same time is pretty rare. Even if such rare chance arises, just remember that patience is a virtue — just wait and it will soon be your turn (actually somehow I always found myself at the lowest of priority order at home). Build an exclusive toilet for every single person in the household that might have a need to use it is simply not economical!

I guess everyone over 3 year old should understand why don’t we have a dedicated toilet bowl for everyone living in the house. But apparently not everyone agrees that web hosting companies don’t need to have dedicated disk space and traffic allocation for every customer on the box.

(Sorry about the toilet analogy. I promise I won’t use this kind of illustration again on HostingFu, finger crossed :)

HTML Validator

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:47:52 +0000
Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of Web documents:
http://validator.w3.org/
Copyright © 2007Dapur Hosting(digitalfingerprint: 8f57a6d5215d02f26c482a6410e1682f)Share This

Today`s suggestion:

Overview

The site that you are looking at now has been hosted by LunarPages since the
first day for more than 5 years! Currently, I also have another two websites
hosted by LunarPages currently. I used to have eight accounts with them! Thanks
to the multiple domain hosting feature, I can now host more websites using less
accounts.

The discussion below is based on my experience with LunarPages as one of their
longest customer. You cannot get more insider information about LunarPages
elsewhere :-)

LunarPages is currently serving over 150,000 customers in over 200 countries. It
was founded in the summer of 2000 when a successful large scale hosting
provider, Add2Net Corporation, expanded its hosting offerings to include shared
hosting.

They are offering two Unix shared hosting plans - Basic Hosting ($7.95) and
Business Hosting ($22.95). The $22.95 plan is a larger plan with unlimited disk
space and 15,000 GB of bandwidth. They also offer other types of hosting
including Windows hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated and semi-dedicated servers but
in this review, I'm just going to write about the $7.95 Basic Hosting Plan,
which I believe is sufficient for 99% of you.

Plan Size and Features

1,500 GB of disk space and 15,000 GB of bandwidth are a lot. Click on the small
picture to view the original wallpaper of Saguaro National Park, Arizona. The
size of the large and high quality picture is 228 KB (kilobyte). With 1,500 GB
of disk space, you can store more than 6.5 million copies of this picture! And
with 15,000 GB/month bandwidth, this picture can be viewed more than 65,700,000
times a month (That's 65.7 million)! The most suitable words to describe 1,500
GB of disk space and 15,000 GB of bandwidth are "More Than Enough!". :-)

There are many web hosts that offer large disk space and bandwidth, but keep in
mind that these web hosts might have funny restrictions such as file size limit,
daily bandwidth limit, or even binary files bandwidth limit (pictures, MP3s,
Flash ...). LunarPages does not have such restrictions with your disk space and
bandwidth usage. You can upload a single 1,500 GB file if you want and you can
finish your 15,000 GB bandwidth in 1 day. As LunarPages founder and CEO, Ron
Riddle told me, "We actually allow people to use everything and we have no
problem offering them what we are currently offering."

Customer Support

It is not the large disk space or bandwidth that make me rank LunarPages as #1
high but its superior customer support! They spend a great deal of money hiring
a lot of support staff to take care of their customers. All of them are very
friendly and knowledgeable. With their effort on customer support, you can
expect the best attention from them.

1. Email support - Simply email support@Lunarpages.com and you will always get a
good reply, no matter if you are a current customer or you just need to ask some
presale questions. Good replies are replies with the exact answer you need. I
suggest that you send them an email right now to see how effective they are. All
email will automatically be tracked by the same ticket system used by the
support help desk. This is my favorite method to request support, because it is
fast, convenient and effective. Email support is available twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week.

2. Support Help Desk - You will send your inquiry through the use of an online
form. All your inquires will be tracked and recorded using their ticket system.
They even keep a history of all your issues so you can refer back to them
anytime you want. There is also a knowledgebase of frequently asked questions in
the help desk so you can find your answers without creating a support ticket.

They used to be using a third party support help desk system known as DeskPro.
But because they are so rich customer oriented, they decided to dump DeskPro and
develope their own help desk system and call it LunarDesk!

3. Toll-Free Support - Just call 1-877-LunarPAGES if you need phone support for
USA and Canada. For the United Kingdom, call 0800-072-9150 instead. If you live
outside of these countries, you cannot dial the toll free number. They provide
another support line for their international customers: 1-714-521-8150. I have
called them several times and they have no problem talking to me with my slang.

4. Lunar Forums (LunarForums.com)- LunarPages provides forums to let their
customers communicate and help each other. You can find many answers for your
questions. You will also meet many happy customers there. Remember only hosts
that are confident with their services and have many customers dare to set up an
open forum. Currently, the forum has around 35,670 registered users. And
LunarForums is also one of the oldest webmaster forums out there.

I will surely rate their customer support as 10 over 10, or 11 over 10 if I can
:-) Their customer satisfaction speaks for itself. I always stress to my
visitors who write to me that if they are web hosting newbie who need a lot of
attentions and supports, they should always pick LunarPages. This will make sure
that they are fully taken care of in their "early age".

If you have read my reviews or other web hosts, you will notice that I will
state that if you have any unresolved issues with the host, you can always
forward them to me and I will take them directly to the officers. Even though I
have direct contact with many important officers of LunarPages (even the CEO), I
never mention it in my LunarPages review. I don't need to do so because all
LunarPages clients are able to resolve the issue directly with the dedicated
support staffs without going through a third party like me.

Sometime ago, I have submitted a possible SPAM issue to them. To my surprise,
not only that they reply to my email but they have also called me and left me a
voice message! You can click on the 'Play' button below to listen to the voice
message yourself. They did look into SPAM issues seriously to make sure the mail
server is not blocked. They are constantly making sure that all their customers
emails will be sent and received properly.

Click Here to go to Lunar Pages
website.

Giving a word of appreciation or gratitude to this piece of writing on web site hosting reviews would be enough encouragement to us to continue producing such informative articles on web site hosting reviews.
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