How Google and Twitter Can Help You Choose a Web Host: 3 Simple Techniques For Discovering Web Host Reputation

How do you know if a web host is reputable? Would you trust the host themselves to tell you the truth? Or maybe a marketer earning commission-based sales? No way! The only way to be sure is to lobby for impartial advice and consumer opinion. And here are 3 simple techniques for doing just that.

Common Tools You Can Use to Find the Right Web Host

Finding a web host is easy. But choosing the best one requires a little more effort. Any sales page can make a product sound perfect, but sometimes you need to dig a little deeper before you get to the truth.

Consumer opinion is a wonderful thing, people love to gossip, especially if they feel they have been wronged or suffered inferior service. This is no different with web hosting consumers and you can use this to your advantage when looking for a good, reputable web host.

Apart from the actual hosting resources on offer, there is 1 beneficial factor and 1 crucially important factor to look for when choosing a web host. And there are 3 very simple techniques to ascertain whether a web host possesses either.

Experience and Reputation: The Marks of A Good Web Host

Finding out how experienced and established a web host is could not be easier. Simply check the About Us page of their site to see how long they have been trading. If a web host has been around a long time (remembering that anything over 3 years is a long time by online business standards), and are still going strong, then it can be affirmed that they are providing a reasonable service and continuing to compete in a famously fierce industry.

More important is reputation. This is a crucial factor to research when choosing a web host. There are 3 very useful tools at your disposal here: Google, Twitter, and real customer feedback. Here is how each can help.

Discover a Web Host’s Real Reputation

1. Google

With its newish side bar, Google has made specific research easier than ever. Type the name of a web host into the search bar. Then go to the side bar and click on the ‘More’ tab to increase the list of specific search options. Select ‘Discussions’ and the results list will now contain more relevant results.

Go a step further and specify a recent time frame in the ‘Any Time’ section of the side bar, last month should be fine. You will now have recent results that will contain plenty of reviews/comments about the web host you queried.

*Choose results that are not directly linked to the actual web host’s main site, or forums.

2. Twitter

Everyone loves to gossip and badmouth on Twitter, even about web hosting, so use this to your advantage by using a sad face and Twitter’s own search function to find out more about a web host.

In the Twitter search, type in the name of a web host and then follow this with a :( (semi-colon and a open parenthesis). This is an old texting and IM emoticon indicating sadness!

Twitter will then produce a list of tweets that have both the web host name, and the :( emoticon in the tweet. Because of the 140 character restrictions on Twitter, many users will used :( rather than waste valuable characters explaining they are upset with the web host. This is a great method for digging out negative tweets connected to specific web hosts.

*You can also use the :) emoticon after a host name in Twitter search to find positive reviews

3. Real Customer Feedback

The important word here is ‘real’. There will be plenty of web host sites and probably more disreputable affiliate sites around, ready to provide you with misleading information and biased opinion. By all means check out the web host’s own site, but do not take their word as gospel, and never accept any customer testimonials placed directly on the site.

Try to search for unaffiliated review sites and web hosting forums, or check out some website design and development forums, many of those will have hosting sections. These should provide you with true customer opinion of a web host. Try to avoid forums associated with a web host, or obvious affiliate websites.

To find useful forums, utilize Google’s side bar again. Type ‘web hosting’ (or named web host) into search, expand the side bar options and select ‘Discussions’. Make the results time-relevant by selecting results from past month, and then select ‘forums’ from ‘All discussions’ options.

Never Rush Research: A Good Web Host Makes All The Difference

If you are going to spend a lot of time and effort on creating and developing a quality site and filling it with relevant, purposeful content, it is search engine suicide to rush into a hosting decision and end up with a unreliable web host.

Choosing the wrong host can damage your site’s reputation, leave it vulnerable to hacking attacks, ruin its visibility, and end up costing you financial and mental anguish.

Ask yourself these two questions: Is it better to take the time to fully research a web host and make an educated selection? Or should you to rush into a decision, believe anything you read, and end up having to switch providers, or worse...suffer a web host disappearance?

The answer is fairly obvious.

Google and Twitter are great tools for choosing a web host, do yourself, and your website, a favor and utilize them.