Web Host Grading Criteria

We have developed a host grading system that we feel is the best in the industry. It's based on our own proprietary host rating criteria. This page explains why our host rating system is the best and why we do things differently.

Why we do what we do...

We had been building commercially successful websites for over 12 years when we opened HostingGrades.com. For a good part of those years, the one thing we struggled with was choosing a good hosting company.

You see, many good hosting companies grow so fast that the quality of their services and technical support begin to suffer, necessitating the need to find new hosts, often under dire circumstances. So, like many people, in the past we used "host rating sites" to find our webhosts.

What we discovered along the way was that, because most host rating companies let their users "vote" on web hosts and comment about them, this introduces two fatal flaws that skew the ratings:

• It allows unethical hosts to repeatedly vote for themselves, distorting their grade. Yes, many of these host rating sites do use cookies to prevent repeated voting, but all a user has to do is delete their cookies to vote again and again. If one host gets 10 votes a day from genuine customers, and another votes for itself 100 times a day, it's not hard to see which host will rank number one—and the unethical hosts rise to the top.
• It also allows disgruntled users to bash a host, and it's often undeserved, born of ignorance for not understanding the host's terms of service and the limited role a host has. All hosts will have their share of clients that become dissatisfied, it's inevitable. In general, the bigger a hosting company is, and the longer they've been in business, the more complaints they'll have. If a host has 3,000 complaints against them, it seems like a lot...unless you happen to know how many clients they have. If they have 100,000 clients or more, 3,000 complaints isn't much at all. It means 97,000 clients aren't complaining.

We got burned by one of those unethical hosts who used a dirty bait and switch tactic. They were abetted in their underhanded tactics by a host review site that sold its rankings, so we began researching how to really choose a good host. You'll find many of our discoveries in our hosting articles section.

Next, we took what we learned and developed our own host grading system. We assigned different weights to different aspects of hosting and graded each one, then add up the scores to determine an overall hosting grade. It's worked beautifully for us in selecting hosts for ourselves!

Knowing a lot of people struggle to find a good web host, we got the idea to help them—and that means YOU—by sharing our hosting grades. Thus, HostingGrades.com was born.

We don't assign grades to all 10,000 or so hosts out there, and as you read the rest of this page you'll soon see why.

Our Host Rating Criteria

Years in business...

New hosting companies, especially low cost hosting companies, often experience dramatic growing pains. Hiring and training a qualified tech support staff takes time. Working out the bugs takes time. Developing a quality infrastructure and reliable systems of operation takes time. Additionally, many hosts fold in the first year or two—we don't want to be a guinea pig for a newer host and have them fold, costing us time, money, and extra work, so we don't use or recommend hosts that haven't been in business at least two years.

Infrastructure...

Infrastructure includes the data center the servers are in, security, the fire suppression system, back-up generators, geographical location, equipment testing and more.

Architecture...

This includes the type of equipment used, the quality of the equipment, equipment maintenance, built-in redundancy, firewall security, DDOS prevention, multi-homing, server resource management, bandwidth allocation and more.

Connectivity and Speed...

Connectivity is the web hosts connections to the Internet. This is how many physical connections there are, the speed of the connections, and how many different bandwidth providers they use to assure reliability and availability.

Technical support...

Several areas are graded: the speed of gaining technical support, the quality of the support, the hours of support, and the options for obtaining support that are available (phone, toll-free phone, chat, ticket system, email, etc.). Only those who offer toll-free technical support 24/7 can achieve the highest grade for this category. If something goes wrong, we want to talk to someone...now!

Pricing...

The most expensive isn't necessarily the best. We grade cost against features, options, and several other factors. Of course, with the cheap hosting category, the price receives a much greater weight since that is the key feature people shopping that category are looking for. There are some cheap hosts that are quite good though, so "cheap" does not equal inferior.

Features...

It's getting harder and harder to distinguish hosts by analyzing the features they offer because almost all hosts give you way more features than you'll ever need. Still, we know which features are key for most users and we rate each host accordingly.

Guarantees...

Money-back guarantee, uptime guarantee, price freezes, support response time guarantees, hardware replacement guarantee—we evaluate it all.

Server Crowding...

It's not uncommon for a host put 600 to 1,000 sites on a single server, but some hosts really push the limits, cramming 1,800 sites or more in a single server. The more crowded with sites the server is the more potential there is for downtime, sluggish response time, and other problems. Overcrowded servers don't score well with us!

The Final Ranking Factor

Personal experience...we personally use several of the hosts we list.

Why use more than one host?

If all our sites are on one host and that host down, all our sites go down. If we spread our sites among several hosts and one host goes down, we're still in business with the sites on other hosts.

Plus, if a good host goes bad (it happened to us once before) we won't have to move ALL our websites, only the ones on that host.

It's just smarter not to put all your eggs in one basket, especially when you consider how inexpensive web hosting is these days.

In addition to that, we personally know several web designers (professionals, not hobbyists) and use their expertise to include the hosts they use for their own sites and their clients sites. So, the final ranking factor is our personal experience or the experience of our trusted professional associates.

As you can see we put a lot of thought and energy into our hosting ratings.

We obviously can't grade every hosting company out there when we put this much effort into it, but then, you don't need to know about all 10,000 web hosts, you just need to know about a few good ones. We list the top ten hosts in each category. We excel at bringing you that information because we're really only giving you the research we do for ourselves.

We're also not in the business of trashing other businesses. Yes, we do know of bad hosting companies, some very bad hosting companies, but we won't list them. All the companies listed here are above average. Any company that doesn't measure up to our high standards is simply not listed. We won't waste our time or yours with negative reviews. However, if you are considering a host that we don't list here and you want to know if we consider them a bad host, just drop us an email and tell us the host and we'll either tell we think they're a poor host (and why) or we'll tell you we don't have an opinion about them.

What We Do NOT Count

The main thing does not factor into our grading system is visitor feedback. That doesn't mean we don't consider what a visitor says, we will look into complaints if we think they're legit, but then OUR investigation would become the factor.

The reason we don't consider visitor comments or have visitor voting is that most of the people who would vote or leave comments are those with complaints, be they fair or unfair.

A web host may have tens of thousands of satisfied customers, and very few, if any, will go to a host review site to praise their host. Few have the motivation for that. It's the people who have complaints who are self-motivated enough to complain, so the dissatisfied clients end up being severely over-represented.

Nearly all of the "feedback" options other host review sites offer are highly vulnerable to abuse. Dissatisfied clients can file complaints under different names, vote repeatedly against a company, etc. All they have to do is delete their cookies after each vote or complaint and they can go again and again.

Web hosting personnel can also vote or comment repeatedly, either for themselves or against their competitors.

And now you know why we developed our own in-house system and do not factor visitor comments or voting into our grades. I'm sure you can see our system is a lot "cleaner" than a system that is subject to abuse so easily.