One thing I do when I’m searching for a new hosting company is to search for complaints against them. Now, you’ll find complaints against every host, so just finding a few hundred or even a few thousands complaints doesn’t mean a whole lot. You have to take the complaints you find with a huge dose of skepticism. For example, one host I recently researched had just under 2,000 search results for “host name sucks.” That sounds like a lot of complaints, but when I checked some of them, many weren’t complaints at all, but host review sites trying to lure people to their site with tricky, worrisome page titles. This particular host has over a half million clients, so 2,000 complaints (if they were all real, which they weren’t) isn’t very many complaints at all. That’s just 0.004 percent of their clients that have complained. However, the rabbit hole goes deeper still. Many of the complaints that seem legitimate will prove to be from the same people hitting site after site with the same copy and paste complaint as they seek revenge for a self-perceived grievance. So, 20 complaints may really be just one complaint, repeated multiple times across many sites. There are three kinds of people who file complaints:
- People with legitimate complaints.
- People with unfounded complaints.
- People from one hosting company trying to deal a blow against a competitor! After the complaint they often go on to rave about how good their current host is, which is, of course, themselves.
Let’s take a quick look at these items one at a time.
People with Legitimate Complaints
It’s hard to sort out the legitimate complaints from the unfounded ones, but people with legitimate complaints often offer detailed objections tempered with reason; while people with unfounded complaints often write emotional tirades with far fewer details. You’ll also find that complaints against a web site host number in the tens of thousands when the host really is bad, rather than just a few hundred or even a few thousand. Remember too, the longer a host has been in business, the more complaints they’re likely to have against them. A host that has been around 10 years will naturally have accumulated more complaints against them than recent start-up.
People with Unfounded Complaints
Some people have unrealistic expectations of a web host. They may expect support for 3rd party software, or expect their site to never be down for even one second when there are legitimate reasons a server can go down temporarily, such as to reboot the server or install a security patch. Every host experiences some downtime. It’s when it becomes chronic or takes too long to get back online that you should be greatly concerned. Also, many times the person complaining about a host has violated the host’s terms of service, often repeatedly, and has been served several warnings, but the client continues to violate the terms of service he or she agreed to when they signed up. Let’s be realistic here. A host doesn’t just cancel an account and cut their own income because they want to jerk someone around. They often have little choice but to cancel an abusive account holder. These are often those who complain the loudest while denying any fault of their own.
Dirty Hosting Tricks
Some unscrupulous hosts will file complaints at review sites against a competitor to try to sway people to themselves. They’ll praise their new host (which is really themselves) in glowing terms after filing their false complaints, but check out the “recommended host” and you’ll often find as many, if not far more, complaints about them as the host they purportedly have a grievance against. These same unscrupulous hosts will write glowing reviews about their own company using a multitude of aliases. We have to face the truth — anytime the public is allowed to rate products and services there will be those who try to game the system, so we have to view the praise with a wary eye as well. I don’t put a lot of stock in hosting complaints unless there are several thousand of them. Remember, when you read a complaint you’re only hearing one side of the story. A lot of times the host will have a far different side to tell. That’s if the complaint is real to begin with. I used to recommend people ask their friends who they recommend for a web host, but as I’ve learned, unless the friend you ask is fairly experienced and knowledgeable about web hosting and understands your hosting needs, you could as easily get a bad recommendation as a good one.