Hey KPR…I think I just welcomed you to the board today?
Don’t believe everything you read from a host talking about review sites!!!
Trust me there are two sides to every story. Many of the affiliates here have “gambling review” sites…so they know the game with respect to deals & special positioning. I’ve read some of the casino reviews from some of the members in this forum!! :happydanc
The information presented here is for the members of the forum..to help them with hosting questions….
1) Wirenine.com hosts only 781 domains and is not a player
2) Fuse9.net is not a player and hosts just over 100 domains.
3) HostGator specializes in reseller hosting and they are good. Brent the owner has a fast growing business there and is trying to keep up with growing demand levels. He is hosting now over 90,000 domains.
FYI…just because a web host answers a support call in the middle of the night does not make it a good webhost. 90+% of all support calls for North American hosts are between 8am – 8pm eastern. For most of the sites we own the traffic also falls in line with these hours of operation…so I would rather have a host support me more with good resources on peak hours than after hours.
Slotplayer also makes a good point…just because the host is physically located in one geography does not mean all their servers are in that geography or assigned local IP addresses. Many hosts, such as Canadian based hosts have a few servers in Canada with the majority being located in the USA due to significant cost savings.
I do agree that if you are targeting a certain geography it would be nice to have a server in that geography…but I think IMHO that there is more weight factored on the domain name. For example, more weight factored in for .ca names if you were targeting Canada.
The Alexa server analysis is flawed for web hosts as it is not taking into account individual server uptime. If you reside on a shared hosting server that has one person dragging down the processor(s) and using all the resources, ALL the domains on that shared server will be affected. This is why load balancing and redundancy servers are important for a shared web host something that the majority of the “off-the-shelf” hosting control panels do not have.
Therefore, you could be a client of a shared hosting company that has 300 servers and 299 of those servers are great (and the review sites say that the web host is the best)…and “your” server has a “spammer” or like customer on it…you will have a bad experience with that server unless the host has measures put in place to stop the activity from the bad client. Too often than not, most of the clients on that one server are pissed because all they see is their websites and email are down…they get mad at the web host because they are down and want 99.99% uptime like their telephone for their $5.95/mo fee. They think the webhost is terrible..and start flaming the internet with bad news about their experience with that host. Even though that host 99% of the time is a good host.