The following review of the web hosting unleashed was conducted between March 5 and 8th, 2007. It is written in a semi-stream of consciousness kind of way.
Upon doing any review or critique, one must ask a simple question: what is the purpose of whatever it is to be reviewed. In this case, it is a website that is about web hosting: Web Hosting Unleashed “Research your hosting choice”. I may be biased (and I certainly don’t follow my own rules all the time) but, if you are selling a product or a service, or trying to attract visitors, I would think you would want whatever it is ‘you are about’ to be front and centre.
When I visit Web Hosting Unleashed, I don’t know what the site is about. The tagline, “research you hosting choice” while uninspiring, does give the reader a bit of a clue, but not nearly enough. More would be nice.
[Editors note: in between the time this review was started and when it was finished, the webmaster added three new graphics that do help the reader figure out what the site is all about, but there is still some ambiguity.]
Clicking on the About link found in the upper right hand corner the readers learns that:
- Web hosting unleashed was started in 2002 to help people find good hosting
- That two guys, Joel and Ben, run the site
- the site has had many different designs
As a reader, I could care less about this information. What I want to know is, why would I want to use this site and/ or what does it have to offer. I’m still not exactly sure, all I know it aims to help me find good hosting. Good? Good is a very benign word, why not ‘the best’ or “affordable, reliable, and peer reviewed”? This is what I would be most interested in as a reader trying to find out about web hosting.
Anyway, I digress. So I’ve arrived at the site looking for information about web hosting. Prominently displayed is a link to “Guides” that are about webhosting and will help me determine what kind of host / which one in particular might be good for me based upon my needs. Unfortunately, these guides act as filters, and only bring up webhosts that match the ‘guide’ I have chosen. So for example, if I select reseller webhosts, I get only the top web hosts which allow reselling. This guide doesn’t tell me what reselling is or why I would want it. It does ‘guide’ my choice, but it certainly doesn’t inform.
There are articles written by the Unleashed team (see, “9 Tips For Not Getting Screwed By Your Web Host” but the taxonomy of guides vs articles makes me think too hard. I probably wouldn’t delve into them as a novice reader interested in webhosting. As a more experienced person who has used several web hosts, I just might. Anyway, back the task at hand.
Frustrated by the Guides I want to find out who it the best host overall. From the homepage I click, ‘best hosts’ and I am brought to a new page entitled, “Most Recommended Hosts.” The page notes that, “These hosts have more than 15 positive reviews and are recommended by at least 90% of the reviewers.”
The web host ‘LunarPages’ comes out as #1. I click to read the reviews of LunarPages. Various peoples names are listed. I have to click on the name of someone to read their review. I go back, I click on another. Ok. Fine, I get the idea that the people on this site like LunarPages. I browse around the Internet a bit and can confirm that most people really do like LunarPages. As to what features LunarPages has or their pricing structure… I have to go to their website to find that out.
Overall the design is very pleasing, I’m more of a minimalist guy, but I can appreciate a design that isn’t. The colour scheme is very pleasant and the layout would be familiar to most web surfers or easy enough to understand pretty quickly (it also works well under FF and IE in OS X and XP).
Its clear that these guys are just revving up the site; a few tweaks, a little less clicking and more transparency would do the site justice. I would go here to find a new host or at least get an idea of which hosts I should check out. But as a beginner I wouldn’t make it past the first page – there are just too many options.
[This review was paid for (aka sponsored) by Webhosting Unleashed. The opinions, words, ideas, and everything else in this article are all mine.]
09 Mar 07
3:12 am
Thanks for the input, I will see what we can do to streamline everything, the images are the first step to improving the frontpage. We have been testing all day and our bounce rate has lowered quite a bit. The frontpage has been under testing for about a week to help improve peoples ability to find what they need.
I’ll see if I can clean up the message of what the site is about too, we thought research your hosting choice was clear but its so easy to fall in that blackhole as a designer. The site is is a big database of user reviews of hosting companies so that people can find a hosting company that won’t disappoint them with bad support or a scam or so on. Think like the eopinions of web hosting.
We have the backend for the comparison stuff and that will be coming out soon, its just takes a lot of time to put all that plan info in while fixing all the other stuff so we decided to do it in steps. After we get the frontpage done tomorrow we are going to finish cleaning up the guides and then move onto the comparison stuff which should help you find hosting by price and other factors.
The site I guess is more aimed at people who have a web site or have already had one site hosted, we don’t have a budget to really attract first time hosting users since hosting companies can afford to buy really expensive ads and we can’t, basically we try to just catch people after they get screwed the first time and are looking for a host not run by a 13 year old in their basement
Thanks for the review!
Thanks, Ben
WebHostingUnleashed.com
03 Jun 07
4:53 pm
thx for this
but,
do you know any good wordpress hosting services??
i have tried http://myfreehoster.info to host my wordpress-cms but will take a look at your review
but i dont know ..
03 Jun 07
5:51 pm
If you are looking for a free host I recommend just using wordpress.com, if you are wanting paid just about every host on the planet supports wordpress, hostgator, lunarpages, hostnine, icdsoft, etc etc
I’d look more at other specs as you really can install wordpress anywhere.
thanks, Ben
23 Sep 07
12:55 pm
[...] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here [...]
24 Sep 07
12:09 pm
I have been searching for a lot of hosting companies, and some of them even blocked by other companies. So for those having customers/partners overseas, you need to ask if their IP addresses are clean?
15 Oct 07
3:43 am
I recently changed my server companies. I am interested in not having my websites shut down because I was getting to much traffic to them at night. They would be shut down for an hour and my users were saying how cheap my website was being ran.
Well all is better so there are a lot of things you should take into concideration when looking for a great hosting company.
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12:27 pm
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19 Jul 10
10:36 am
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