About

A short history of WebsiteHosting.com

Problem

These days, finding reliable web hosting for your website or blog is a safari-type experience. You either trust yourself or find a review site to lead the way. The problem with both is that you don’t know if you’ve made the right decision until you’ve invested. Moreover, with the array of rating sites available online, it’s easy to get entangled in the world of fake reviews and fall for the gimmicks that some of these sites engage in to earn commissions.

Internet marketing has changed everything. Now, it is almost impossible to search for hosting reviews without landing on some affiliate websites. Dozens of them with fake reviews, forged ratings, fragmentary speed, uptime results, and deceptive “actual testing” analyses dominate SERPs, spending thousands of dollars on SEO. These scam sites just want to rip you off. Their plan is to use fake ratings to get your attention, make you sign up with their affiliate links, and thereafter, leave you high and dry.

For us, the problem was obvious. So is the opportunity to make something useful for the community.

There is a bunch of simple online tools that can show you who hosts any site. It wasn’t enough for us, so we decided to take a little step further. We believed that it would be more useful for a prospective customer to see how hosts gain or lose customers over time.

Solution

Driven by the idea, back in 2015 we downloaded zone files for major domain extensions and analyzed approximately 150 million domains to calculate the customer base for each web host. After that, we analyzed all of them back to 2013 to see how web hosts have grown. It took us 18 months to process the data and on November 1, 2017, we launched this website with historical domain trends for almost 30 thousand web hosts. However, at this moment, to use GoogleBot’s Crawl Budget more efficiently we limited this number to 5 thousand most popular ones.

At the same time, to give you the full picture, we have scanned ratings from 50+ most popular hosting review sites and added them to our database. We then assigned each rating site what we call the “Trust Score“, and taking into account those values we calculated weighted average ratings for each web host. Now, you don’t have to check multiple review sites while shopping for web hosting, we’ve done all the hard work for you. For hundreds of web hosts, along with the historical domain trends, we show you how they are rated by 50+ review sites.

In simple words, WebsiteHosting.com is a big data tool, built with the sole purpose of helping webmasters browse through a bunch of affiliate websites with fake reviews. Unlike other hosting review sites, we don’t post fake 5-star reviews and forge the ratings because we do not receive compensation from web hosts.

Every day our servers process data for almost 400 million domain names and over 400k customer reviews. Based on this data we draw charts and graphs for almost 5k+ web hosts.

We don’t hide anything. We show information as it is. Our ultimate goal is to bring openness and transparency back to the hosting industry. We hope you will find it useful.

Update:

Access to hosting data and statistics tool is temporarily limited as we are completely rewriting the code to make it faster and safer. We’ll get it back online shortly. Stay tuned.

Domain Name

You might be wondering how we got such a valuable domain name for this website…Well, to make a long story short, we paid $415,000 for this domain name back in 2011. That’s almost half a million US dollars. So, please stop asking to sell it for a few bucks.

Support this Project

No affiliate links, that is the main principle behind this project, and we will keep it this way. Your generous donations help us move forward. Thanks!

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Privacy and Cookies

Your privacy is our top priority. Your personal information is kept confidential. We do not sell, rent, or use it, including your email address to advertise third-party products or services.

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Full privacy policy: https://websitehosting.com/privacy/.