Tired of Web Hosting Reviews that don?t tell the truth?

Do you want unbiased reviews based on the experiences of real webmasters?? Read on to see who web hosts my newsletter subscribers voted for.

NOTE: In the next week I am updating all of the web host reviews and ratings, so please bear with me. ?You cannot rely on any info on these Web hosting pages until I have completed the update.

Web hosting is one of those things you need to get right at the very start. A bad hosting service can cost you time and money while your website server is down, and the search engines can suddenly drop your pages out of sight if they cannot find your domain when they come crawling.

The big problem with the reviews you read online is that you don?t usually know how old they are, nor the motives of the reviewer. Did they give awards to that host because they had something to gain?

With this in mind, I created a couple of surveys for my newsletter to try to find the best, most affordable web hosting services. The idea was to get real webmasters to give ratings for the hosts they had used in the last couple of years. This survey could then act as a guide or reference for anyone looking for a reliable host.

I didn?t differentiate between shared hosting or dedicated hosting in the surveys, and nor did I look at specific features like inclusions of MySQL databases, number of email account, fantastico, etc. If one particular host is given a good score, then its because they are a reliable company, so all of their hosting is probably good.

The first survey asked them which host they used, and details of how reliable etc. From that initial information, I narrowed down my search for web hosts to just 9.

The second survey was based only on these 9, and asked anyone who had used any of these 9 hosts in the last 2 years to score them from 1 (poor) to 10 (Perfect).

Since these votes all came from my newsletter subscribers, they are unbiased, and should help you make some decisions.

OK, the Web Hosting Survey results. Drum roll please??

208 people answered the survey. A big thanks to everyone who took the time to do so.

The first question was a tough one. I asked you to put the following in order of importance to you: features, cost, support, reliability.

Here are the results:

1. Reliability
2. Support, Cost
4. Features

Reliability was voted as the most important factor in web hosting by around 62% of those who answered the survey. I totally agree. If reliability is poor, the rest doesn?t matter because when my sites are down, I don?t make any m0ney.

In second place, it was too close to call, with Support and Cost being equally important.

The least important factor was features.

I suppose this last point probably indicates that most web hosts have all of the features that standard users will want, therefore it?s not so much of a concern.

It is probably only the power users that will need a little bit more.

OK, the second question in the survey was a grid showing the top 9 web hosts (according to newsletter subscribers who took the previous web hosting survey a couple of weeks back).

I asked you to rate any host that you had used in the last 2 years on a scale of 1 (poor) to 10 (Perfect).

The results surprised me.

The Winners

The top scoring host was Host Department with an average score of 8.3 out of 10 ? [based on 3 votes])

Because it only had three votes, I have excluded it from the top web host table below. However, be aware that it might be worth investigating yourself.

Top 8 Web Hosts as voted for by readers of the ezSEO Newsletter are as follows:

#1 ? Host Monster (Score 8.9 ? [8 votes]).

#2 ? Lunar Pages (Score 8.1 ? [9 votes]).

#3 ? Host Gator (Score 8.0 ? [109 votes]).

#4 ? Bluehost (Score 8.0 ? [31 votes]).

#5 ? 1&1 UK (Score 6.3 ? [13 votes]).

#6 ? 1&1 US (Score 5.9 ? [35 votes]).

#7 ? Go Daddy (Score 5.3 ? [46 votes]).

#8 ? iPower (Score 4.5 ? [15 votes]).

If you are looking for a host, the table above gives you an unbiased score for each host in the survey.

I would particularly recommend you look at those in the top 4, as achieving a score of 8 out of 10 is some going. While the top two had relatively few votes, Host Gator was voted for by 109 people, and still achieved an impressive 8 out of 10. That would be my recommendation for best host.

If you have any comments about these or any other web hosts, please post your comments below.