Tuesday, November 17, 2009

How to Gauge a Web Hosting Review: 3 Pitfalls to Avoid

If you plan to start up an online venture, a big item on your agenda is to peruse one Web hosting review after another in order to pick out the best platform for your business. The good news is that the Internet is chock-full of commentary on hosting services from all sorts of people.

The bad news is that a lot of the write-ups are beset by defects of one kind or another. To compound the problem, the commentator often has little or no interest in providing any sort of trenchant tips for the reader.

On one hand, a blurb is often nothing more than a promotional mouthpiece that extols the virtues of a mediocre product while paying no mind to a plethora of serious flaws. At the other end of the scale, a write-up could be a rabid outburst that rails against a decent platform while giving little or no credit to a raft of positive features.

Another common shortcoming stems from the fact that the blurbs usually come with no indication – whether in the commentary itself or at a nearby resource – that the author has a solid grounding in the area. On the contrary, the signs often point in the opposite direction: the writer has a patchy and superficial grasp of the domain. If the rater has a meager knowledge of competing platforms, for instance, then they are hardly in a position to assess the merits any product in relation to the field as a whole.

To guard against the slew of pitfalls lying in wait, you ought to approach any review that you come across with a healthy dose of skepticism. In this light, you should gauge the soundness of any write-up that calls itself a Web site hosting review.

There are three main criteria for evaluating a hosting review: thoroughness of the assay, the degree of objectivity, and the level of expertise. These factors may be assessed in the following ways.

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