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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

It'd be cool if one of these spammy hosting comparison sites actually did some work to do things like monitor downtime, support ticket response times, and so on and so forth.

Good support counts for a lot, especially when the shit hits the fan, but resources/dollar count too, and it'd be nice to know exactly what kind of tradeoffs you're making, or if a hosting provider is simply below the curve.

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Just curious why you think the article is "spammy"? That is a pretty pejorative term to toss around.

It seems like sound testing and analysis of the things that are readily tested.

He doesn't even have a link to either provider. Doesn't look like he is looking for referral $ or anything other than sharing what he learned.

> Just curious why you think the article is "spammy"? That is a pretty pejorative term to toss around.

I did not say anything about the article being spammy. I said "hosting comparison companies". The article is quite obviously on someone's blog.

Going off on a little tangent here: Listings at hosting "comparison" sites are more or less universally based on how much of a kickback the site owner is getting from the host, and/or how good of a promotional deal they can give their visitors when they sign up for that host.

Compared to these sites, this article is chock-full of data. And I don't see a referral link anywhere. :)

Most of them are, I replied a few comments above you in this thread because my startup's goal is to fix the pay to play hosting review space. You seem to have experience dealing with it and I would love to hear your thoughts.

how do you expect to do that with a for-profit entity?

Make it transparent. It keeps me honest and let's you verify. Also using tons of data. I've got somewhere near ~130,000 reviews in my database. Once it's setup, it runs itself, the costs are quite low. The marketing is honest reviews. Something nobody else can really claim, if I cheat, I lose my only advantage. Take a look at the linode page and tell me what you think http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/24/linode

I will be clear, I am not profit maximizing at all. The amount of companies trying to buy placement is staggering. It's very easy to understand why my competitors would do it. I could probably make 10x the money if I accepted their offers. But I don't plan on just doing web hosting forever, my goal is to scale the technology and review lots of things. If I sell out my brand now, who would ever use it later?

The trick is to do both. Create one site that's honest and pure (like you have), and a completely separate site where you sell higher placements to companies. You then don't care about what people think about the profit making page.

...and by so doing, make the world just that little bit worse off by making it harder for people to find and identify genuine information. Would that fewer entrepreneurs were totally okay with that.

Actually, you DID kind of say that:

"one of these spammy hosting comparison sites..."

Well, you did say "these spammy hosting comparison sites", which seems to imply that the linked blog is one of them.

We monitor uptime :)

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-uptime-beta

Plus benchmarks etc (user run, which means you get a decent dataset to compare by server spec/location).

http://serverbear.com/9683/linode#view-benchmarks http://serverbear.com/9806/digitalocean#view-benchmarks

We've actually considered ticket response times, a lot of hosts use WHMCS to manage their nodes - which we could make a plugin for. But a large amount of the more established hosts use a custom system.

Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality. Anyone could respond with a "We're looking into it" within 5 mins & not get a resolution for a few hours.

> Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality.

I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...

Thank you for ServerBear, I use it all the time and send others to it often.

Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.

See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5207693

Thanks! ^_^

That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)

I have another one: add South America/Brazil to the location filter.

I suggested to remove I/O in Unixbench on WHT, is that still being considered?

I feel your pain and while my startup doesn't exactly monitor those issues, I try and monitor them by proxy. How? I am tracking what users are saying about the company, I also break it down by type of comments - support, uptime/downtime, price. I am trying to avoid that 'spammy' feel by making it transparent with all the data being publicly collected and sourced to social media. I'd love to hear your feedback because avoiding the 'spammy' label is what I am trying to fix in that industry.

http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

Hi there. I tried your Hosting Helper at that link, and couldn't get it to give any different results no matter what I entered in the various fields, or how big of a budget I selected. It always recommended shared hosting, with the same list of five recommendations. Is it supposed to do that?

Honestly, it needs a lot of work. It will recommend VPS/Dedicated stuff as well if you mark any of the check boxes. It's been a big issue trying to figure out how to automatically recommend what type of hosting someone needs. The majority of the visitors to the site need shared hosting and don't know it. So it caters to them for the most part. The underlying assumption is developers know what kind of hosting they are looking for on a macro level and can get straight to the data. But maybe that's not entirely true?

I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.

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