Those who read Daw Web Hosting blog know that this is an authoring website, not a a bunch of web pages created to publish news about “great achievements” of web hosting companies. Most of the articles published here are focused on real issues, not on someone’s product or service. I believe is that the web hosting industry definitely needs more journalism, and more unbiased opinions that worth the time and really help consumers and other agent on market. And we definitely need to be more critical to web hosts not just in terms of their reliability as providers, but also as a business brands.

I started this article because I’ve seen today a significant number of reviews, forums threads and post, and of course blog articles which are created only to point attention to any company’s product or service. This is a very cheap commercialization of web hosting industry, that depreciates it.

I’ve searched for some web hosting related topic around the web today and saw that most folks who wrote something that involved any company’s name did nothing, but to say how good it was and how happy wer its customers. At the same time there are a number of real issues that no one talks about.

One of them is that the web sites of the most of the overpraised shared hosting companies (Ironically 95% of the “greatest web hosts” are either regular shared hosting providers or just an oversellers) are nothing but cheap presentations that aren’t user friendly at all.

Another thing to discuss is that most of shared web hosts never invest in their website designs and brands and just place on the front pages of their sites a copy/pasted pictures of happy girls. As a results of this we can see a few faces that smile from thousands of web hosting pages. If these girls have a contracts with those who use their faces to promote cheap web hosting they would be millionaires.

Even popular shared web hosts such as Bluehost (Hostmonster), IXwebhosting, Siteground, Ipowerweb and many others use copy/pasted smiling faces on their home pages – faces you can find on thousands other web pages, faces that happily promote anything from frozen fruits to web hosting and budget airline tickets.

Of course there are many other quality businesses such as Verio, Hostway, HostMySite, Rackspace, Lunarpages (even if their plans refer to overselling), Host Color (my previous employer), Softlayer, Peer1, Liquidweb and etc, that make a difference. Those companies invest in web presentations and models of providing customer care and technical support that make web hosting a prestigious business.

Those web hosts, the ones from the second group, never fake within the forums and hosting blogs. Have you ever seen any of them to be mentioned in a cheap forum thread or post? I haven’t.

This article does not claim to tell web hosts how to do their business. It is just a note that says that producing cheap services is not what is web hosting about. So think of what are you going to contribute to the industry when you are planning to start a new web host, especially a shared one.