Web Hosting’s Dirty Laundry

The world of web hosting is magical and wonderous. Having a website lets you show the world extremely important things like pictures of your cats, and also lets you share your not-at-all-crazy political views with the WORLD!
Let’s say you don’t know a whole lot about web hosting, but you really want to get into the business because this guy your brother knows runs some porn site and he “totally never has to work and dude he just made like a grand yesterday. The guy drives a Ferrari! I’m so super cereal dude.”

That doesn’t sound like a bad idea! Your first thought would probably be to search around for reviews of some of the more popular web hosts, and then you’d probably wind up signing up with a highly-rated host. Google around for “hosting reviews” and you’ll see a plethora of helpful web host listings.

Nearly every web host that’s listed on these totally unbiased and completely objective sites have one thing in common - they all have affiliate programs. Each unsuspecting visitor that clicks through to a “highly rated” web host earns the site-owner a hefty little commission. The hosts that pay out the biggest commissions are usually the ones that you’ll find listed near the top of all these lists.

They’ll make it sound like they’ve done all the research for you, and that their top ten picks are the absolute best web hosts in the industry! But in reality all they’ve done is researched how much cash they can squeeze out of any given web host’s affiliate program.

Of course we’re generalizing here, so not all of these types of sites are as bad as they may seem…oh wait, yes they are. Some of these sites produce little fluff “reviews” of web hosts, and some don’t even bother to go that far, instead making lists to the “Top 10 Web Hosts” and waiting for unsuspecting prey to come along and make their next yacht payment for them.