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Choosing a web host is a more challenging task than it may seem. These pages grew from one skimpy paragraph almost five years ago to the current length of seven pages as a result of our own painful experiences with hosting companies over the six years since we put our forum online, experiences we would like to help you avoid. We are on our eighth host. We went through the first six of those hosts in our first 18 months online! You can catch up on our current experiences with the Host from Hell, CI Host, on a new page devoted entirely to what they've been doing lately, to us and to other unhappy former customers who have posted honest negative reviews of their service on the Internet. These web pages are oriented towards webmasters who intend to run an interactive forum at their websites. Those of you who connected directly to this webpage via an external link and have no interest in web conferencing will still find valuable information on choosing a host here. Adding an interactive forum to your website changes the equation -- it's a different ball game than just posting static web pages when you have participants checking in regularly to read and post new messages. Bear in mind that Web hosting services make their money by maintaining a high volume of customers, not by providing good customer support. You'll be logging into your forum on at least a daily basis, several times a day if your forum is busy, and as such will be much more aware of server performance than the average webmaster because you're more likely to log on during peak times, or when the server is down. Your members will feel a certain degree of ownership and will e-mail you about problems you may have missed. You'll be more demanding than the usual customer, you will need a more robust server environment that the average webmaster, and you must be certain your host will provide reliable service and will respond quickly if you need technical support. Setting up a website and forum are time-consuming jobs, and you don't want to do either any more often than absolutely necessary. Conduct your host-hunting with care! Several "Host Directory" or "Host Review" sites have come online publishing lists of "Top 10 Hosts" or "Top 25 Hosts" or "Best Low-Cost Hosts." Most Host Directory sites have little interest in providing real assistance to hosting customers, and every interest in getting more advertising dollars from the web hosting services that support them -- note how many of their advertisers are "recommended." Ignore all their ratings -- they're useless, and have nothing to do with the real-life experiences of webmasters. On many of these sites, hosts pay for their high ratings. We have been hosted with three "Top 25" companies and have not been impressed, to say the least! CI Host was rated in the top five on many of these sites until their total melt-down -- our one month with CI Host was nothing short of disastrous, and we were certainly not the only ones to have this type of experience. Here is their BBB Reliability Report which reads, in part, "This company is stating on their website they are members of the Better Business Bureau and participants in the BBB On-Line Reliability Program. They are not members of the local Better Business Bureau and are not included in the Better Business Bureau's On-Line Reliability Program." We believe it was our August '98 complaint that first brought CI Host to the attention of the BBB of Fort Worth, Texas. You can read about their December, 1999 "glitch" as reported on SlashDot (it's a big page and takes a bit of time to load). The story was also picked up by c|net and PC Week. In addition to stories about the melt-down, MSNBC had posted the article "CIHost exposes credit card numbers" (now gone). There are a lot of unhappy former CI Host customers out there, and many of them have banded together to petition for class action status in a lawsuit against CI Host. There have been more lawsuits recently. Find out a little more about their CEO, Christopher Faulkner, in this SMU news item. Don't put any trust in Host Directories with "voting" options: ballots can be stuffed. Some sites try to get around this by requiring that you currently have a website hosted by the company you vote on. Of course, if you were unhappy with a host you've probably left it by the time you find one of these voting options. Don't believe lists of "reviews" either. Many of these sites simply filter out negative reviews, especially of companies that buy advertising from them. Review sites are also very easy to "spam" with positive reviews. As a participant pointed out on one of the forums we monitor, he found one host with a half-dozen good reviews at one Host Directory site, all posted by "different" people with, surprise!, the same e-mail address, which just happened to be the address of the owner of that hosting company. It's all too easy to get a dozen hotmail/yahoo/whatever free e-mail accounts for the purpose of spamming these sites with favorable reviews. Or fake negative reviews. Our current host, QWK.Net, was threatened with negative reviews by a host on our "avoid" list for hosting this website, by someone who has never been a QWK.Net customer, after QWK.Net refused to take down this website; and we have heard of other, similar, incidents. It is absolutely amazing how many hosts known to be unpopular with webmasters are recommended on some of these "Host Directory" or "Host Review" websites! Note whether or not these sites accept advertising, who their advertisers are, and who's getting good reviews. Any company still accepting advertising from CI Host should be viewed with great skepticism. And if they recommend CI Host.... web hosting © Copyright 1999-2003
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