Not Your Ordinary Top 10 Hosting Providers List

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Everyone seems to have an opinion on who should wear the crown of top 10 hosting providers. We’ve even thrown in our two cents on who the href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/compare-best-five-hosting/" target="_blank">best five are, and we stand by that list. However, nearly ever hosting company out there claims to be the best of the best, top notch, or most supreme whatever. We got to thinking… what if we put on our silly hats for a minute and looked at other reasons a web host might be able to claim to be in the top 10? While the href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-reviews/">web hosting companies WHSR recommends and reviews deserve to be in a top 10 best web hosts list because of their superior service, href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/pressidium/" target="_blank">other hosting companies might make a very different type of top 10 list for quite different reasons.

Some of these reasons are valid and others will clue you in to what you should watch out for if a company is trying to scam you.

Reasons to Make the Top 10 List

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As you’ve probably already figured out, we’re not necessarily recommending any hosting companies that might be inadvertently mentioned in this article, although some we may recommend. We’re simply having a little fun with the concept of a top 10 list while teaching you what to watch out for from those who would claim to be better than they actually are and at the same time teaching you how to recognize a truly good deal when you do see one.

Check out our reviews for a list of website hosts we do recommend.

Free Hosting

If we were going to write a list of the top 10 free hosting companies, we’d start with Jerry Low’s list of href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/featured-articles/freehostingservices/" target="_blank">5 Must-See Free Web Hosting Services. If you are just getting started with website hosting, a free hosting solution might be smart for you. There are obvious limitations with any free hosting company, so you’ll want to be aware that you may have to put up with advertising on your site, very limited space and bandwidth, and servers going down.

Cheap Hosting

There’s cheap hosting and then there’s cheap hosting. One list of href="https://plus.google.com/+JerryLow/posts/UdNYjVqQzd4" target="_blank">top 10 cheap website hosting companies might include less expensive companies that offer excellent service for the price, such as href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/a2-hosting/">A2Hosting or href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/web-hosting-guides/my-hosting-story-downtown-host-review/">Downtown Host.

However, some unscrupulous companies might place themselves on a top 10 cheap hosting companies list simply because they charge very little for their inferior services.

Things to look out for when choosing a web hosting provider that is cheap include:

• Packages that require lengthy commitments. For example, your fee is only .99 a month, but you have to pay in advance for two years. This ties you in and no matter what they say you will have a hard time getting your money back.
• Consumer complaints on the host’s message boards.
• Check the terms, conditions and cancellation policies carefully.

“Some of the most common complaints I’ve seen about hosting providers surround non-refundable terms and cancellation fees. And most of the time, these fees and policies are clearly spelled out in the terms and conditions you agree to before you start hosting with them.” – href="http://webdesign.about.com/od/findahost/qt/cheap_web_hosting.htm" target="_blank">Jennifer Kyrnin at About.com

Most Twitter Followers

What about a list of the top 10 hosting companies with the most Twitter followers? Twitter is a pretty popular social platform after all. While we do recommend href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/socialmedia-marketing/how-to-use-twitter-for-small-business/">using Twitter to promote your business and gain new customers, we don’t really recommend it as the best way to choose your next website host.

As of November, 2013, HostGator has 46,563 followers and 19,156 tweets on Twitter. That means absolutely nothing about whether or not HostGator is a good hosting company to trust your sites with. Of course, you can read through some of those tweets and get an idea of different things HostGator is offering customers, so there is a slight advantage in that. However, it really doesn’t give you an indication of customer service.

Just as an example, the Twitter page had a Tweet that read:

“Thank you for your patience today. Almost fully restored now; continuing to work with affected customers until 100% stable.”

Yikes! As a potential customer, that would make me a little nervous. Why isn’t the system stable? However, all servers have problems from time to time. This could be a one-time issue that they got on immediately and fixed. If you find a lot of tweets like this, though, then beware. Just above that tweet is a shout out from a customer named Kristi, who says, “Thrilled with @hostgator support today. Very professional & helpful!”

id="attachment_7559" style="width: 760px" class="wp-caption aligncenter">href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/web-hosting-guides/not-your-ordinary-top-10-hosting-providers-list/attachment/host-gator/" rel="attachment wp-att-7559">class="size-full wp-image-7559" src="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/host-gator.png" alt="twitter feed" width="750" height="392" srcset="http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/host-gator.png 750w, http://whsr.webrevenueinc1.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/host-gator-300x156.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px" />class="wp-caption-text">Screenshot 11/26/2013 from HostGator Twitter feed. Learn more about href="http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/hosting-review/hostgator/">Hostgator hosting services here.