There have been a lot of discussions in the online communities about the legitimacy of Top 10 Web Hosting lists. and I 100% agree about the affiliate nature of top 10 lists. But let me shed some light on that industry from my 13 years experience in the digital media industry:
If you search in Google for Top 10 web hosting you will get 138,000,000 results 99% of which are affiliate thin site with crappy contents and lots of affiliate links. And they depend 100% on SEO to get their traffic.
Now the 1% remaining are further divided:
1- sites that has been around for a while and have strong relations with lots of hosts, hence they were able to collect big number of user reviews. However, although you can see a lot of reviews but user rating is NOT reflected in the top 10 list. So still the top 10 list is driven by affiliate commission or advertising fees.
2- Now the other remaining part is rather honest and trying to change this monkey business and really care about users. The problem is those sites are less visible because they are honest and thus has weaker relationship with hosts.
I will mention for example hostjury.com everyone knows who is running this site and knows they are trustworthy
Also ReviewsGurus.com a site that I'm personally running for 4 years now trying to stand by the user side. How do you know this is different? Simple:
- try to post a review & rating about a host and see how the rank will change accordingly in the next GuruScore update (which is every night).
- And the hosts that are paying for a top placement are marked expectantly as "Sponsored" and their GuruScore remains as is. providers tried so hard to pay to get a higher score but they couldn't (you can ask around about the GuruScore)
- You can easily find a webhost that is in the top of the list that doesn't pay commission at all! only because it's a good host.
I'm not trying to promote my site here but I thought to shed some light about this mysterious niche.
My two cents!
Nabil Orfali
www.nabilorfali.com
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