Web hosting review sites are one way of choosing a host, to see what other people think before housing your entire business website with a bad hosting provider. Unfortunately, many of these sites are fronts for the providers themselves, are loaded with shill reviews, or list only the hosts that pay the review site owner the highest commissions. You may want to take this into account before trusting them.
Several hosts are in the slimy business of creating “web hosting review” sites that look real, and may even have some real reviews and possibly even allow users to submit reviews, but of course skew all the results so they come up at the top and their direct competitors are near the bottom.
Secondly, and related to the first problem, even if the review site isn’t actually owned by any hosting company it can be quickly overrun by phony reviews from employees of the hosting companies. And the bad hosts are more motivated to do this as they may have a bad reputation elsewhere on the web. This is quite common on Amazon.com, with authors’ friends creating fake accounts and reviewing just the one book, giving it five stars.
And finally, most web hosting review sites are created out of a motivation to receive commissions. This is fine in theory, except many of theses types of sites will only rate the highest-paying commission sites with five stars, at the top of lists. So all you are really seeing are lists of web hosts who pay the website owner the most for getting people to sign up. You certainly won’t find reviews of free web hosts on such sites.
In conclusion, beware of so-called “web hosting review” sites that may be contaminated with biased reviews. The best method to research a host before entrusting your business website to it is to look for short comments on blogs instead of full reviews, as these are less apt to be abused by unscrupulous web hosts.