It doesn’t matter just how fantastic your website may be if visitors can’t actually access it. Whether you run a blog, an e-commerce site or any other kind of online business, choosing the right web hosting provider is absolutely crucial to your success. What’s worse, many people who are shopping around for web hosts don’t even know what they should be looking for in the first place!
A new comparison engine has popped up called SiteGeek and it aims to provide you with comprehensive, objective reviews of thousands of different web hosting companies. Better still, all of this information is not only current and honest, but it’s also completely free. Here is our quick review of the site and what it has to offer.
Choosing a Web Host Just Got Easier
The main objective of SiteGeek is a simple one. It “monitors the entire Internet 24/7 and brings current information on 100 data-points about 40,000 web hosts directly to you for free.”
Yes, there are other websites out there that also list reviews of different web hosting companies, but SiteGeek says that many of these reviews can be spotty, outdated or even flat out wrong. They can also be incredibly biased, whereas SiteGeek aims to empower you with “100% impartial, data-driven web hosting reports and reviews by real users just like you.”
And that’s a big part of it: the reports are data-driven, as SiteGeek looks toward key data about each of the web hosts so you can make a more informed decision.
Provider Profiles and Reviews
The best way to illustrate what you get with SiteGeek is to look at one such report. Here is the Hostgator page on SiteGeek.
While the information is data driven, the report isn’t overly complicated. The line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts make the data easier to understand, even by people who aren’t as tech savvy. You can see the overall breakdown of user sentiment, for instance, as well as the recorded uptime percentage. The report also breaks down the number of new domains on that web host, the number of transfers in and out, and so on.
It also helps that you can see the number of sites are hosted with that provider and you can click on through the “Traffic” tab for more data too. Below the graphs, you’ll find a section with user-submitted reviews. You get a rating out of five stars and a brief write-up. In the cast of Hostgator, though, there are no user reviews at the time of this writing, but that will likely change in time.
Analyzing the Daily Statistics
Using the search bar on the main page or near the top of every page on SiteGeek, you can look for any hosting provider that you desire. Beyond this, there is also a daily analysis that you can access with a myriad of statistics.
The main part of this daily report is the uptime and downtime analysis of all the web hosts in the SiteGeek database. You can see the top three companies in terms of uptime (which is typically 100%), as well as the worst three webhosts in terms of downtime (two have downtime over 10%!). This can be useful, but I would have liked to see a longer list of each, possibly a top five or a top ten.
Below that, you’ll find similar graphs illustrating the top 3 gaining and top 3 losing companies in terms of the number of customers they are gaining or losing that day. If you were thinking of signing up with a web host, but you notice that many customers are abandoning ship, you may want to reconsider your decision.
Still a Work in Progress
As it stands, SiteGeek holds a lot of promise. You get a really simple, yet also very robust engine that will monitor thousands of web hosting providers and key you in on some of the most important information about them.
That being said, SiteGeek is still a relatively new site and it still has room to grow. The advertising page is still blank, for instance, and there are still many missing entries on the FAQ page too. Thankfully, the core engine is fully operational and completely free to use. Shopping for a web host just got that much easier.
Source: John Chow Dot Com
SiteGeek Helps You Pick a Better Web Hosting Provider
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