Ethics Rules for Webhost Marketing
Web hosting is a matured business, there're thousands of service providers to make the competition hard. For new players, they always have to use lots of methods to get customer orders, either ethical or unethical. Their primary chanllenge is to survival in the business. BUT, that makes users especially novice hard to determine a quality service provider. A decent service might be ignored because they did less marketing while a less quality service doing big efforts on it. This is what we're going to discuss in this topic.
How did you find your hosting provider?
The internet got great improvement these years and makes our lives more and more easy. No matter what we need, we can always find a perfect solution via few clicks away. Search engine plays the most important role in finding something we needed. When we not sure where to navigate, search engine(google) is always the primary place to check out. No matter if we trust the search results or not, the first page always get the most clicks. Means if the website is perfectly optimized and ranked very high on google, it will receive numorous visits from search engine redirecting.
Another way would be forums where almost every service providers advertised there. Some industry leading forums bring big business to hosting providers like Webhostingtalk. If we have some basic knowledge about hosting, we will look into such forums and ask for suggestions from experienced user or simply go with the recommended section directly since we trust the reputable forum brands.
So are they all right? Can we go safely with our choice? Well, just continue to read below.
How can we trust online hosting advertising?
Before we trust any info we should understand we're going to pay something. Because we're going to pay money, there'll be lots of providers trying to sell their products with every effort. So generally what we see on the web is not always what we needed at the very begining.
Search engine, every business knows it's importance and did everything they can to get higher ranking from search results. Forums, always spammed by tons of messages. Many service providers employ people to write fake reviews there and build a positive reputation on the site. Because of this, we can be misguided easily.
It's easy to write out 24×7 support and 99.999% uptime as well as 10 times more than what we actually need on their websites, however it always takes 100 times efforts to archive it. Not every company would like to invest that much. For many new setup brands, they just setup their business on several VPS instance or a single dedicated server. The support, billing and sales might be all handled by one or two people. What they really concerned is to sell their service to more people instead of fixing problems efficiently.
Nowadays, in order to gain business, people have tried almost all they can. Just yesterday, I received an email saying if I cancel my service with current company, they can offer me 6 months free VPS hosting with only 1 month payment! But when I check their website, it's only registered one month before! Can I leave a reputable company and put my business with such service? Absolutely no.
Conclusion
For people who need hosting service but not sure where to go, the most safe choice is to list out the old brands and search reviews of them. Generally speaking, if the positive rating is over 80% with that company, then it will do good with us, at least we know we're hosted with the direct equipment providers instead reseller or renter. No offense to new providers but it's really hard to evalue them, but I believe they will be reputable brands if they can put customer on top position.
From early days, there's less competition for online marketing so people can focus on actual service quality and gain business by offering leading techs and service. However, as more and more players join into the industry, money becomes the primary consideration. A quality service is hard to get customer if they don't implement some "unethical" methods like their competitors. As a result of that, people can't figure out which is good or bad, that's the source of so many complaints from users.