I went looking for some info on a particular hosting company this week-I won't mention the name. What I found was pretty shocking really and a bit of a let down.

How much can they be trusted-how frequently do people make fake, derogatory reviews?

I take every review with a grain of salt. The only ones I trust are those that are highly detailed and verified.

There's more fake "good" reviews than fake "bad" reviews. So there's a little extra grain of salt to keep in the back of your head that the bad review has SOME truth to it (usually).

Granted, an annoyed user that gets terminated for spamming etc might post a review about how they were kicked off a machine for no warning, or that they didn't do anything wrong, but more often than not, when someone leaves a company they spend less time thinking about the bad place than they do looking at the new one.

The larger the company, the more reviews (positive and negative). There's also the companies that get very few reviews at all as people just don't talk about them much. Companies that cater more to ecommerce and small business hosts generally don't have a ton of reviews, because those mom and pop ecommerce clients are spending so much time working on their own business, they rarely have time to help promote the hosting company they use.

For me, bad reviews generally have some sort of underlying truth, but the review will always be slighted by the person posting so as to influence the decisions of others.

The problem with a lot of these bad reviews is that the OP leaves out most of the stuff they don't want you to hear. If I don't see the provider's view of the issue so I can make a balanced judgement, I'll almost always disregard the thread as sour grapes.

I would agree with seeing both sides of the coin however as most of us take reviews from our clients, and then spell check/modify them to fit (summary) with a read more... most of the large companies will take it a step further to doctor all posts or simply reject any negative feedback.

The site escapes me now, but an interesting experiment they where trialling was the use of a wordpress blog, to post the reviews and allow users to then comment as well as their support department to get both sides of the story. Not sure if it worked and again there is still the potential for the screening of reviews but it is a more open method.

Very tricky area none the ess, as even independent forums fall fowl of fake reviews.

I've seen a number of hosts that get reviews from customers in which the customer posts the review on THEIR site, and the web hosting company then links to that page of the users site. This is a TRUE review in that regard. Of course, again, the host can be biased and only link to the good reviews

Independent review places are also nice. I've been involved in a few different ones for software vendors where the customers of the software vendor provide the review to the software vendor which is listed on their site. This way not only is there a review of the hosting company, but also reviews from people using the software (validated by that software company). In most of those cases, they do not remove negative feedback.

Just like a top list however, it seems that "independent" review companies fall victim to collecting payments from hosting companies to post their reviews and top ratings on the first pages etc.

I don't know of any TOP list that does not collect money (directly or through affiliates) - why else would they be in business!

Mostly, reviews which appear through Google or Yahoo search are not honest to people who are looking for a hosting company. Why? Simple because most of these "Review" sites are provided by those hosting companies like Hostgator, Justhost and others.

Welcome to Hosting Discussion, indy0077. But there sure are a lot of review sites out there, are'nt there? And it's amazing how many of them don't actually have reviews from users. And I love wording like, reviews updated daily.

Look for websites or forums that verify reviews (by checking that the reviewer is actually hosted by the provider).

You mean they really aren't a bunch of "independent" web developers that put a list of the top ten best web hosts together of the goodness of their hearts.

Plenty of food for thought-thank you. I had been of the opinion that a bad review was more believable than a good, and this has confirmed that. Shame really.

You're probably right, but I never use one review to judge a provider, rather as many as I can find thru the search engines and forums - and then only the most recent ones.

I ran across a forum where one of the more prominent individuals promoting an affiliate web hosting site was actually soliciting reviews for payment.

The titles were similar to the examples below:

Get Paid for Sharing Your Hostvwxyz Experience (and he goes on to say, "I am willing to pay $3 for a very short review (5 - 10 sentences)."

One month later he ran the next request.

Share Your Hostvwxyz Experience - $5 per review (And once again he offers,"I am willing to pay $5 for a very short review (5 - 10 sentences).")

Not all hosting companies own web hosting reviews sites. Not that getting listed on most of them is all that hard, or can't be solved with a bit of cash, unfortunately.

I don't really see something wrong with that as long as the reviews are genuine and all reviews, positive or negative, are published. No different to pay per post on forums, or paying writers for articles on a given subject.

There are lots of people with valuable web hosting experiences worth sharing that need a small push to take the time and tell their story. If $5 is what it takes, that's fine by me. We all know that customers tend to get vocal when bad stuff happens, but not so much so when thing are going great. This sort of push may help get some of those positive experiences out into the light.

Now, you might not like the "Hostvwzyz" limitation, but there's a ROI to be considered. A fair reviews site that doesn't fulfill its owner's needs as well as those of visitors, will disappear, and the loss will be everybody's.

Just as if WHT, or Hostingdiscussion, or any other forum would fail and disspear -- we all end up poorer because of it. And just because advertising on these forums is prohibitive to some hosts, doesn't mean they're doing anything wrong.

A "top hosts" or reviews site will usually be willing to add any hosting company that has a well paying affiliate program. No one stops a host from offering such.

How often have you seen a negative review of a hosting company on a website that an affiliate is promoting? Probably rarely if ever. He also states on his site he would like to have feedback whether positive or negative. However there are no negative reviews on his site.

So just out of curiosity, a friend of mind decided to submit a review with predominantly positive comments but also described one or two less than favorable problems of his real life experience with this host. The promoter of the affiliate site rejected his review and naturally never paid him. If my friend were to have left out the negative aspects of his review, I would be willing to bet the affiliate would have used his review. Even though the payment is only for five bucks, how many people would be willing to just state the positive experiences with a hosting company and conveniently leave out any negative experiences. I am more than certain it does happen quite often.