There are so many review sites on web hosting. However, many of these are owned by the web hosting companies themselves, while some others are being paid by web hosting companies to make such reviews, so naturally the reviews are focused much on only the positive aspects of the concerned web hosting company.

To spot a good web hosting review site from a not-so-good one, here are a couple of pointers. First, a good web hosting review site always conducts its reviews in an objective manner. A good web hosting review site usually will have a metric system of evaluating the performance of a web hosting company. Next, the reviews are recent and up to date. Reviews made about a year ago may no longer be relevant now, considering that many web hosting companies take steps to improve their site every so often. Always look at the date the review was conducted.

When it comes to web hosting reviews, RealMetrics is a name you can trust. This publisher of metrics for web hosting companies conducts 140,000 tests daily against real accounts. It assesses the reliability and overall actual performance of an online service provider by measuring the peak uptime, uptime, speed, the reliability of its customer service, plus CPU speed index and disk speed index in the case of VPS hosting.

RealMetrics, then, ranks these web hosting companies based on their average uptime. This is the time it takes for a website to upload. Ideally, the uptime should not be less than 99.99%. RealMetrics is not paid by online service providers or web hosting companies, so you are certain that the reviews are not biased at all.

If you are an online service provider you can have the option of adding the metrics of RealMetrics into your site so your visitors can immediately see your performance online.

If you are fairly new in web hosting, there are many web host articles you can find in the World Wide Web to help you get around. Often enough, these articles talk about the basics — what web hosting is, the different types of web hosting, how to detect a good web host, and so on. There are other articles, too, that deal with web host ranking and web host rating.

Web hosting companies, otherwise called online service providers, are rated and ranked to serve as guide for potential customers and users. Usually, the ratings are based on several factors. The first of these factors is disk space. How much space does the web host provide? Personal sites do not require much space, but big companies often do. Bandwidth is also a factor in rating a web hosting company. Bandwidth is the total amount of data a site can handle.

Another determining factor when rating a web hosting company is reliability. Sometimes, when downloading a page you get to see messages like, page not found or similar other messages. This means that the online service provider is down. If this happens fairly often, this indicates that the web host is not very reliable at all.

Availability of customer support is one other factor web hosting review sites use to rate web hosting companies. A good web host offers technical support twenty four hours a day for seven days a week. Also, the technical support should be made accessible through several communication means, such as email, telephone, facsimile, and the like. This factor is very important, especially if customers are to take part in the rating system.

Last but not least of all is the price factor. How much does the web host charge its clients? The price should be worth the service it provides.