I do a lot of article marketing for my niche sites but am wondering if it would be just as useful for a hosting business. I am referring to writing articles about choosing good hosting, what to look for, what to beware of, etc and submitting these articles to directories with a link to your hosting business in the resource box. Does anyone do this type of marketing for your web hosting business?

Yes, I cannot see why this wouldn't work. If you take the same approach then you are basically doing it to get your link out there and to get it known that you have knowledge in this area-and thus can be trusted with the client's business. Handled right I think this would be good.

Yes, beside this, still need other method also..

I was just throwing it out there because I get a huge amount of mileage out of article marketing for my niche sites but I hardly ever see anyone mention it in association with a hosting business. I just was wondering if there was a downside in conjunction with the type of business and I wasn't seeing it.

You always need more than one method, just using one would be a little insane to try and do unless of course it was something so amazing that it worked like a charm.

There's a number of companies that are actively writing articles and then wording hosting companies and links into the articles.

We haven't done it ourselves here for other article resource sites, but we have written press releases and articles for inclusion in newspapers or TV or radio. Advertising through articles (or editorials) are something that have been done for YEARS in newspapers. Almost every magazine article that you read is a sponsored ad in some regards.

I cannot see any downsides to it, UNLESS, you are really bad at writing articles. That being the case you might want to have someone else do it for you so that you don't just make youself look like a fool in front of potential clients.

That would of course just indicate a lack of anything up top, rather than an expertise in the business.

It depends on the type of article marketing. If your talking about paying bloggers to make an articles about your site, that may not be good because after a day or so, your site may be a few pages back. And visitors won't even see the article.

Whilst this is true, if there is a link included in the article then it still serves a purpose. I have yet to here that Google has completely discounted the use of backlinks in part of its PR equation, just that they no longer place so much weight on them. So I still see value to this.