OK, here’s the second in my Interesting Interviews series.
Today I talked to Eva Vesper, who’s the Editor-in-Chief of WebHostingSearch.com, a site that offers reviews and evaluations of Web Hosting providers.
With the plethora of web hosting providers out there, and plenty of horror stories, I can tell you that WebHostingSearch.com is a gold mine of information, particularly for people new to working online and looking for their first hosting provider.
As with all interviews in this series, I have no financial connection with WebHostingSearch.com, so none of the links in this article are affiliate links.
Me:
First of all, Eva, many thanks for giving up your time to talk to me about WebHostingSearch.com. I’ve taken a look around your site and there’s a lot of invaluable information about hosting for beginners, as well as lots of hosting providers to choose from. What prompted you to set up this service?
EV:
We simply felt that there were way too many bad web hosts and hosting guides on the web. There was a need for someone to take this seriously and help people to find hosting matching their needs.
Me:
Can you give us a bit of background on WebHostingSearch.com? How long you’ve been operating, where you’re located and what your plans for the future are?
EV:
We’ve been doing this for more than a decade now and most of us that are contributing to the site live in either Stockholm or San Francisco. Our future plans are to continue doing what we’re doing, and of course there’s always room for improvement.
Me:
I’m a fairly recent entrant to Internet Marketing and I had no clue about your services – how do you promote your site to newbies?
EV:
We get many of our visitors by word of mouth. People visiting our site tend to recommend us to their friends and colleagues, which we of course are very happy about. We also use Social Medias to communicate with our current clients, as well as our hopefully future visitors. Once on the site you will find all the information you need about web hosting through our extensive knowledge base.
Me:
Keeping up to date with the levels of service provided by different hosting providers must take up a lot of time – how do you manage this so that your reviews and recommendations are always current?
EV:
Actually, most of the work is done by our visitors. We do, of course, write our own editorial reviews and keep check of uptime/downtime, and such, but most of the reviews are written by our visitors. Good or bad – whatever our visitors think about their web host they are more than welcome to leave a comment about their provider.
Me:
How do you make sure your reviews and recommendations are objective – do you have a set of criteria that you use for each hosting provider you review?
EV:
For our editorial reviews we do have a set of criteria that we use to remain objective. We have an article on our site where you can read about how we rate the providers. To leave a review, as a visitor, you have to leave an email address, which we then use to make sure that it’s an actual customer leaving the review. Their I.P. address is also used to make sure that they in fact are real customers.
Me:
What are some of the criteria you measure hosting providers against?
EV:
Some of the things that we look at are their numbers, hardware and tools, the customer support, value for money and much more. As already mentioned – check our article on how we rate the providers if you want to learn more.
Me:
I noticed a few banner ads for different hosting providers on your site – doesn’t that make it more difficult to be objective about those providers who are also buying ad space on your site?
EV:
This is of course an issue and we are well aware of this but we do our best to be as objective as possible. Our visitors are the most important thing for us and if we wouldn’t provide them with accurate information we wouldn’t be able to survive as a hosting guide.
Me:
If you had just one piece of advice for people buying hosting services what would it be?
EV:
Ask a couple questions to their chat support in advance to make sure that you will get the support you can expect from a professional web hosting company.
Me:
OK – that’s great. Eva Vesper – many thanks for your time today!
EV:
Thank you!
That’s it for today – keep an eye out for the next interview in this series, and if you have a service you’d like me to research and interview let me know in a comment.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for making these interviews – always interesting!
You’re very welcome – glad they’re useful
Cheers,
Martin.
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