If asked about a particular hosting provider, the first thing I will tell someone to do is conduct a basic web search. There are tens of thousands of web hosts out there, after all, and more than a few will go out of their way to cheat you.
Thankfully, it’s not that hard to use a search engine like Google to dig up dirt about a host. Researching a provider before signing up is the smart thing to do. Here are a few tips:
- Don’t just search the host’s name. Add red flags like “scam,” “outage,” “down,” “sucks,” or “unhappy” to make your query more effective
- Filter your search to include forums and blogs only. These are where most people complain.
- Also search common misspellings of the host’s name and its domain.
- Just because no negative feedback is found doesn’t put the provider in the clear. It could be new or recently changed its name.
- As with anything on the web, take everything you read with a grain of salt. Even the best hosts have their lot of unhappy customers, and sometimes a particularly unhappy consumer will go out of their way to give a firm trouble.