Rating Criteria Explained for our Web Hosting Reviews.
Popularity
The popularity web host rating refers to how prevalent the brand name of the hosting provider is on the internet. This also takes into account other businesses the web hosting company may be in. As example Yahoo! is the number 2 search engine and is extremely popular for news, free web mail and other products. They are not as well known for their web hosting but people looking for a hosting solution have a greater chance of going with Yahoo than another provider simply do to the fact that Yahoo! is in general a respected brand name on the internet. For this reason Yahoo! scored a 10 out of 10 in popularity
Popularity also takes into account the amount of customers a hosting provider may have. More than likely the longer a web hosting company has been in business the greater the number of customers they have and web sites they host. This information may not be available to us for certain web hosts and the popularity rating will reflect this negatively. It is assumed if providers keep the number of customers they have hidden, it is then below most of the other web hosting competition.
CostThe next rating category is cost. The cost rating also reflects the value of the products and services being provided. This means a web hosting provider that offers the lowest price out of all competitors may get a rating of 10. A provider that has a slightly higher price but, may have better reliability and/or features may also receive a rating of 10 as well. Like wise if the cheapest web hosting company reliability and performance is rated very poorly and even though the cost is really good they would receive a lower cost rating since the value isn't there.
FeaturesThe features rating takes into account the overall available features that the hosting company provides. The quality and ease of use of these features is also factored into this rating. This can be a hard thing to rate, especially if the hosting provider has multiple plans with different feature sets for each.
ReliabilityHow reliable is the web hosting company? This rating refers to the uptime of the servers. Most companies report an up time of over 99.9% for their web hosting servers. The problem is this statistic can be played with by less than honourable companies. Questions need to be asked, like, how long was the sample data taken? What type of web sites where on the servers (complex php scripts or simple html web sites)? What type of servers is this statistic for (shared, dedicated, both)?
Because of these questions, we gather our information for the reliability rating in several ways. Through our own experiences with the provider, uptime server statistics as reported by other sites and from information provided by other users using the service.
PerformancePerformance is important, and reflects not only the servers themselves but also the internet connection. Once again we use our own experience and those of other users experiences that we find on the internet to calculate the rating. We are especially interested in shared server experience as well as internet bandwidth available during peak usage periods since these is where performance problems tend to be first noticed.
Customer SupportMost important for web site beginners, but not as important for seasoned veterans. This rating takes into account customer service options available (toll free phone calls, chat, forums, etc...), response time or wait times for customer service requests and the actually quality of the answers provided.
You may notice that all our reviews have an overall rating of at least 75%. We only post reviews of web hosting providers that offer at least an above average level of service. We have reviewed more than a few web hosting companies that offer no advantage over the hosting providers we have posted here. We therefore decided against adding them to our list. For more information on our minimum requirements check out this article.