It is important in today’s world to be aware of where things come from and in the free market society that the internet represents, if you want to be aware of where things come from, then you absolutely must be aware of where the money is. There is a saying that you can follow the money to find where things are coming from and in that sense the money is like a chartered road of sorts; it helps you figure out exactly what is going on.
Nowhere is this more pertinent than in the web hosting review business. If you have been on the internet for any length of time and know anything about the web hosting business, then chances are that you have come across a number of different websites purporting to be able to give out reviews of the different web hosting programs currently available over the internet.
Some of these websites are quite large, encompassing thousands of different web hosting reviews. You will find that these websites have a support staff, real customer service and update their links and reviews on a nearly constant basis. To them, image is everything and they make sure that they have everything in place to be able to ensure that their image remains untarnished.
At the other end of the spectrum is the smaller website. This website will not have a customer support staff, or really any staff of any kind. More often than not, you will find that the smallest websites that do web hosting reviews on all of the top web hosting websites will only be controlled by one person. All of the articles detailing what the best web hosting options are might actually be outsourced and written by others, but it will be a freelance contract at best. And of course in between the largest and smallest websites exist a gamut of other options.
Now, within all of these different websites, you are going to find things like advertisements and affiliate links. While affiliate links are certainly quite acceptable on websites and there is nothing wrong with advertising, realize that this is the main reason that a lot of these websites exist. In other words, the vast majority of websites, especially the ones that seem to be very generic in their design, are going to be there solely in order to make money.
If the website is there solely to make money, the question then becomes what happens to the quality of the review? In a lot of cases, what you will find is that not a whole lot happens to it. This is because a lot of the industry leading websites have gotten to the point where they really understand that web hosting reviews need to be impartial to really get more customers and therefore they do not purposely try to make their reviews positive.
There are some companies that do however and the easiest way to figure out which is which is by simply taking a look at a lot of their reviews. If you see positive review after positive review, then you know you have to take what that particular website says with a grain of salt. The reviews might still be useful, but they require cross-referencing with other sources of information.
