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Finding the best web site hosts the Googalistic way
Created and researched by Daniel White © 2005+
Article published 14/10/2005 (last updated: 08/08/2006)
So far, this page has received only 1 donation, despite being completely honest (you can verify the scoring system for yourself, and see that what we say is true - we use completely transparent and OPEN methods).
Unfortunately (for me), the best web hosts do not have affiliate schemes, so it is not possible for us to make a profit. Please don't make us charge for visitors to see this page in future, and donate today (any amount will do). If you do not have a Paypal account, then a link to our site will be fine.
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Key Google searches:
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Negative
N1 = "hate host x"
N2 = "host x sucks"
N3 = "host x sux"
N4 = "avoid host x"
N5 = "problems with host x"
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Positive
P1 = "love host x"
P2 = "host x rocks"
P3 = "host x is great"
P4 = "host x is * great"
P5 = "recommend host x"
(+ others - see page end)
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This research page (currently nonprofit, apart from clearly obvious adverts) should inform those looking to buy a quality hosting provider for their forthcoming site. How would one decide such a thing though? If you didn't want to take any chances, you may do some research by looking at various web hosting service review sites on the internet. More likely though, you would probably look on message boards, forums, and ask friends for their opinion. This site takes that concept to its logical conclusion. We've scavenged the whole web using Google, and searched for various positive and negative phrases such as "I love host x" or "host x sucks". This way, we can find a rough consensus towards a particular host if there's enough data available.
It's been 6 months since I last updated this page. At the time, Dreamhost was ranked highest, and it brought me a commission of one affiliate sale per month on average. However, due to the turn of events, this site now makes ZERO CASH. None of the links are affiliates (the best hosts just don't happen to have affiliate schemes); they go directly to the hosts in question. Of course, I feel sad, because this research has taken literally hundreds of hours of my free time. Ultimately though, it's worth it, since the best companies deserve to do well (and your hosting will of course be improved). All that I ask is that you
donate through Paypal half of whatever you feel the information is worth to you. If you doubt any of the truth in this paragraph, then have a look around the rest of Skytopia.com; you'll see that it's very much an informational/educational site with just the odd Adsense advert here and there. For the record,
here is the old version of this page. It should appear at
Archive.org in due course.
History of this page:
Initial page created: 14/10/2005
Update 1: 22/12/2005 (63 hosts). Added term: 'problems with hostx', and updated top 10's search terms + specs.
Update 2: 08/08/2006 (62 hosts). Updated top 20 results, and included old statistics for comparison. Removed Directnic.com entry, thanks to the keyword confusion over whether people were praising Directnic due to their hosting, or their registrar services. Also altered ranking formula so that there's less penalization against less known hosts (always weigh the risk yourself though). Turned "i hate hostx" and "i love hostx" into just "hate hostx" and "love hostx" to obtain more Google results.
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Back to how it all works. As I mentioned earlier, using Google, we look to see how many websites report that they 'hate' or 'love' host x. Naturally, the question will arise; how can one be sure the results containing glowing praise about a host are genuine and accurate? Of course, the conclusions can never be perfect due to lack of data, word/service ambiguity, bias, and plain advertising. But it turns out that the vast majority of comments are written on personal sites, forums and message boards. Under such circumstances, posts are more often genuine than not, and for the forums at least, moderators are likely to detect if a recommendation is spam or not.
Research details
The internet searches were first made during the last couple of weeks of September 2005, with updates for the top 10 in late December. I have since updated the top 20 of the 63 hosts during the first week of August 2006. Despite fairly dramatic drops in position for Dreamhost and Lunarpages, and considerable gainings for Bluehost and Hostmysite, most of the rest have remained fairly consistent. You can always verify the results for yourself - in the main table further down the page, you'll see the exact number of searches I made in Google for a particular search term. Careful though, as Google can be a bit temperamental in the number of results displayed at any particular moment (sometimes you need to reload the page or visit different Google Data Centers to retrieve the maximum amount of results possible).
It wasn't easy. I had to filter out Google duplicates using custom made software, and look for spam and advertising among the results. Searches such as "recommend host x" were particularly problematic, so in these kind of cases, each and every result was checked by hand to see if it was a genuine post from a real person. For full details on my approach towards filtering and phrase selection, see towards the end of the page.
Unfortunately, we weren't able to include every hosting site out there, simply due to the fact that there are not enough users to comment on them. Rarer hosts such as
Hostican.com,
Successfulhosting.com and
Parcom.net seem pretty decent, but aren't popular enough to be included.
If you're getting impatient, at this point you may just want to glance at the main table further down and trust the conclusion. Otherwise keep reading on.
Table hosting details
The gigantic table below sorts web hosts by how good or bad they supposedly are. (Try this link if you want to see the
hosts sorted by popularity). You'll find that some high ranking hosts may not have the specs you require (like if you want more than 20 MB of disk space, or higher than 1 GB of bandwidth per month). Equally, many of the cheap or free hosts are lowly ranked due to the obvious limitations (forced adverts, lack of space/bandwidth and limited filetypes and features), but since they're free, they're worth considering (especially if you're a beginner to site creation and want to test the waters). If you're going that route,
Bravenet,
Doteasy,
Micfo and
Directnic (relatively unheard of names) seem to be the best here. Angelfire is the worst, with Tripod following closely behind :-)
The score
At its most basic level, the score is the number of positive comments divided by the number of negative comments. But greater weighting is given to hosts with many members, thus increasing the 'reliability' of the given score. In other words, hosts with a normally good mark, but who don't have a large internet presence will be marked down (due to the margin of error factor risk, and the fact that they won't be as established, making them more of a risk again). And for the same reason, an apparently poor, but minor host's score will increase towards the 'center' of the list if their score was normally low.
For the curious, the following formulae were used:
reliability = (popularityOfHost/30) / (1 + popularityOfHost/30)
ratio = (p1+p2+p3+p4+p5/2+1) / (n1+n2+n3+n4+n5/2+1)
weightedRatio = ratio ^ reliability
SCORE = weightedRatio / (1 + weightedRatio) * 100
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With that out the way, we can continue with a description of the table elements. First off, you'll see numbers in fade, as well as bold. The faded numbers indicate the results from six months back so you can compare. Next onto the basic specs. I only have room to give a very rough indication of the type of web hosting plan you'll get. If you wish, you can investigate the site in question to find out if extras include PHP, CGI/perl, MySQL, ASP, ASP.NET,
| Key Google searches:
The phrases and colours below correspond with the numbers in the main table. Basically, the numbers represent the number of times a phrase appeared in Google. The number in brackets is the total number of results before filtering.
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Negative
N1 = "hate hostx"
N2 = "hostx sucks"
N3 = "hostx sux"
N4 = "avoid hostx"
N5 = "problems with hostx"
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Positive
P1 = "love hostx"
P2 = "hostx rocks"
P3 = "hostx is great"
P4 = "hostx is * great"
P5 = "recommend hostx" (+ others - see page end)
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number of email accounts, email POP / SMTP Access, Windows and Linux/Unix hosting, FTP access, number of domains hosted, access to raw logs, free domain registration/transfer, and other special discounts.
I'll leave that up to you as there's no way I'm including all that data in the table :) If you see '^^ GB' or '^^ MB', that means there's supposedly no limit to the disk space and bandwidth (unmetered), but in reality, there will always be. Always read the terms & conditions and smallprint from each website for the full story (look at the harsh TOS limitations on
Hostultra's free web hosting for example!). Finally, most web site hosting services are based on low cost 'shared hosting', but if you see MBhd or MBvd instead of MB in the table below, that means it's a dedicated or virtual server (and is therefore going to be much more expensive!).
Conclusions
| Most popular hosts (not best!) |
| 1: Geocities | 2069 |
| 2: Tripod | 1122 |
| 3: Angelfire | 966 |
| 4: Freewebs | 705 |
| 5: Dreamhost | 493 |
| 6: Bravenet | 489 |
| 7: Brinkster | 354 |
| 8: 1and1 | 186 |
| 9: Powweb | 174 |
| 10: Netfirms | 169 |
| 11: Interland | 152 |
| 12: Lunarpages | 136 |
| 13: ipowerweb | 129 |
| 14: Bluehost | 124 |
| 15: Hostrocket | 121 |
Any of the top 10 hosts are a good pick, but it would appear that the top 6 are the real cream. If you intend to have a relatively big site with lots of visitors, then bluehost.com, and the slightly riskier crystaltech.com, and the even more risky but tempting hostmysite.com are a good pick. Otherwise 34sp.com do a few mega cheap options for smaller sites that don't munch through too much bandwidth and space.
If however you're rich or need mission critical hosting with tons of support and super reliable hosting, then Rackspace is the way to go. Finally, of course, there's the winner - asmallorange.com - which though a bit risky, and also with an apparently higher cost to bandwidth ratio compared to hostmysite.com, crystaltech.com and bluehost.com, is still decent enough, and possibly better supported than the aforementioned.
As already explained, the opinions and comments all over the internet reflect the data in the table. Type in "recommend asmallorange" into Google, and you'll see results from blogs, personal sites, reviews, and forums. You'll find the vast majority are genuine and display a link without any 'affiliate' motive (not that it's bad to want a reward for referring someone to their site, but you get what I mean).
Sites further down the table are plagued by the usual problems - either lack of disk space, bandwidth, or customer service issues such as site downtime, missing email, download/upload speed, and cost.
Still unsure about what host to choose? Time for a few final stats:
I hope you all find the information useful. It's taken me many hundreds of hours, and sleepless nights ;) I think my site is more accurate than most host review sites, but as always, don't take it as 100% truth - there is certainly room for error in the data, especially with the small-ish sample size, and the fast-changing nature of the industry.
Now the time I ask for some feedback. Maybe you just want to email me to say thank you. Alternatively, I would appreciate a donation according to how valuable you think the hundreds of hours (and I'm not joking) I've spent.
More details on the process of filtering and selecting phrases
Phrase selection - The phrases selected were chosen according to how many applicable results were thrown up by Google. This increases the reliability of the results. Example: "avoid host x" appears more often than "host x is a load of rubbish".
Intial filtering of hosts - Hundreds of hosts were initially checked to see if they appeared in Alexa's top 150,000 web sites. Around half of these made the 'short list' of the 63 as presented above. The other half were excluded because they were not popular enough according to Google.
Google's nested entries: - Nested entries aren't counted so as to avoid results from the same site (mostly to avoid duplicates).
Duplication: "fortunecity is * great" is a good example of duplicates from Google. Out of the 180 listed, only 10 aren't dupes! I specially developed software to remove all of these duplicates.
Name ambiguity: Special care had to be taken for hosts with names such as 'Tripod', as the same word can be used to represent something to rest a camcorder on, the name of a rock group, and is also the name of a comedy group! In such cases, results were manually checked (tedious to say the least).
Cash incentives: - It was much easier filtering out negative comments from the results than positive. The reason for this is because people may recommend a host for commision/affiliate purposes rather than because they genuinely think the host provider in question is particularly good. Host reviewing sites will tend to do this a lot, and it's easy to see how bias can creep in - thus losing the objectivity of the results. For the top hosts, we sifted through every result to see whether people were promoting a host for monetary purposes (affiliate link). In particular, Dreamhost and Lunarpages had quite a lot of them.
Google's unpredictibility: - Problems arose when the EXACT same search resulted in far fewer results sometimes than other times. For example, a search for "tripod is great" can reveal either "1 - 87 of about 188" ...or... "1 - 100 of about 577", depending on what mood Google is in (or more technically, what data center Google fetches the search results from). Because of this, I always double and triple checked the results at various times, and used the larger number of results as the final data collection for my analysis. You'll see I've marked the 'total results' next to each rating in the table so you can verify them for yourself.
Sarcasm: - Supposedly positive comments can actually be sarcastic towards that host provider. I tend to find this the case particularly with the free hosts ;-) Example: "gotta love Geocities".
Service ambiguity: - Certain sites such as godaddy.com, directnic.com, yahoo.com, and pair.com were excluded from the results because they offer other services (such as domain registration or email) on top of web hosting.
'Recommend' search term - Rather than search for "recommend hostx" as is implied above, I used: "recommend hostx" -"not recommend hostx" -"wouldn't recommend hostx" -"don't recommend hostx" -"won't recommend hostx" -"no longer recommend hostx" -"cannot recommend hostx" -"we * recommend hostx" -"we recommend hostx". The last two phrases are filtered because although they seem positive, the use of the word "we" will tend towards affiliate purposes.
Indirect spamming - If you do a search for "hostgator sucks", you'll see that towards the end of the results, there were plenty of spam entries made by domains such as blah-this-site-blah.com which were obviously nonsensical, and hence not counted.
External links:
Choosing a web host to build your website - Following on from this article, we detail what features you'll want from a host, and discuss whether you should go for a free or paid host.
Web hostings dirty laundry - An interesting read. Not all host review sites are as genuine as this story from the Dreamhost blog dramatically demonstrates.
WHreviews - Definitely one of the more transparent host review sites out there. Ranking of hosts is attained by research from customer reviews.
Web Host Magazine.com - One of the most comprehensive host information resources out there, and what appears to be one of the most reliable from what I can see. Also read their section on host finding
Tophosts.com - Similar to webhostmagazine.com, this is probably the most well known host resource on the entire net. Their monthly top 25s seems okay too.
The evils of Overselling. But then read the reason why 'overselling' can invariably be a good thing from the Dreamhost blog.
Web Hosting Unleashed - An extensive collection of many hosts, with somewhat of a correlation with the results I've collated. Web Hosting Jury is a similar site in many respects.
Web Host Magazine.com - How to Find Your First Web Host (For Beginners)
Free Web Space - One of the oldest and best. Customer reviews and rankings of many free hosts. Also see Free-webhosts.com for a similar theme.
2createawebsite.com - Lists disadvantages of free web hosts.
All pictures, data and text on this page are copyright 2005 onwards Daniel White.
If you wish to duplicate any of the information from this page, you must contact me for permission.