Choosing a web hosting provider

I remember the time when I was looking for a decent web hosting service. Back then google was my only help. Not that it was bad, but when you enter a search criteria such as 'best web hosting', you end up with 100s of site that claim to compare 10-15 hosting providers and finally choose the top 3 out of them based on some set of criteria. Half the time you end up spending 10 mins trying to look up the results before you finally find the top 3 hosting providers. Now about 90% of the sites that I have seen, seem as though they were paid by the hosting company to write about them. The top 5 on different such sites rarely even match 50%.

Of course, back then I used to sign up for trial offers on many sites and decide which was good and what kind of service they were offering. I used to google up web hosting companies and compare their plans and what suited me and what did not. Now its about 1 year and I am pretty happy with my hosting provider. I know quite a few friends/groups who have tried to sign up with hosting providers and have burnt their fingers while at it.

Why did I bring this up? I happened to stumble upon a website today which is trying to build up a directory of web hosting providers. I have been trying to look in detail at the site and figuring out how they could help up. Unlike other comparo sites, this one is trying to be an advertisement-free directory only. So far it does look that way only.




http://www.webhostingchoice.com is a collection of Web Hosting providers and their hosting plans on offer. It even has a directory of plans which you can drill down according to various criteria such as Unix, Windows, Python, Frontpage Extensions etc. The first thing that you will notice when you log in to the site is a search box where you can specify some criteria and you will get a filtered list of hosts/plans according your search crteria. The results in all cases are simple and sweet. It shows up in a tabular format where you can compare some of the important offerings on a plan basis.

Then again, http://www.webhostingchoice.com may not yet be completely exhaustive and doesnt contain all hosts(the one that I am on for example :) ), but then its a good star and its worth a look at for someone who is looking for a hosting provider either new or for a change. It also has some sections where you get some tips on what to look out for and also some details on the terms involved in web hosting. I would say this site is definitely a must for someone who is looking to start hosting his/her own site.