What are all the different or top sites that the users of this forum look to for hosting providers. I'm trying to see all of the different sites that rank web hosts to see if they are unbiased or strickly proprietary.

My experience is a lot of these "web host directories" or "web host review" sites spotlight hosts who pay for the privilege. Only a few are based purely on user reviews.

do you know of any posts in this or any other forums where there are independent reviewers? I know webhostingtalk.com has a few. There was an independent that check our network uptime over a 5 year period and it was 99.895% ! I was pretty impressed since we've now been around for about 6 years now. I just want to see where these independents are getting their data for tabulation from. I shall stay diligent in my hunt though. But, I suspect as you do that most are all about the $ $ bills.

Web Hosting Stuff allows for customers to offer reviews of their web hosts. It also provides these uptime stats. However, their top 10 seem to be paid ads.



Its pretty easy to monitor any hosts uptime, you can write a script which checks a web site and records its response time and HTTP Status responses pretty easily. All you need to know is the web address you want to check to make this work, then you run the script at regular intervals (I'd say at least once every 15 mins), a simple analysis of the results will give you uptime stats. However such a system would not take account for scheduled downtime for maintenance/reboots which many hosts do not include in their uptime stats.

Web Hosting Stuff do this and they record my uptime at 99.99%. However I think this is generous as my Professional Monitoring service reports it at 99.95%
http://www.webhostingstuff.com/comp...arInternet.html

If you want professional external monitoring services which combine uptime stats with outage alerts via SMS or email then I'd recommend websitepulse.com.

Our site is ranked #221 on webhostingstuff.com Linkage to webhostingstuff.com for the ever so popular Hivelocity but the pricing is all out of wack most of those services we don't even offer anymore. I'm going to try to get that page updated. I wonder what we need to do to be #1, any suggestions?

The ranking appears to be based on Traffic Popularity, which if that means the number of times your feature on their site is viewed then climbing the rankings will be very difficult without paying for one of their spotlight ads. Particularly if higher ranked sites are shown first, this means they are likely to get a greater share of the traffic which will create a bigger gap between the top and bottom sites in terms of traffic.

It would probably work better if the sites were ranked first by the customer reviews (highest average after at least 5 reviews) with those with more reviews maintaining a higher average getting ranked above sites with a fewer total of reviews. Then by uptime, then by traffic rank.

I would just love to throw money at most of these ranking sites, but I think that they give you bs #'s half of the time on their traffic and lord knows that they probably have surfers doing pay per click surfing.