Category Archives: Web Hosting

The Best Web Hosts of 2013 – Reflections and Awards

2013 was the first full year of operation for Review Signal. It has been an exciting year and a successful year. We've added roughly 90,000 new reviews in 2013. We added two new companies this year. One was a company we struggled with to get listed because of their vast size and scope: Amazon. The other has been possibly the fastest growing new web hosting company of 2013: Digital Ocean. While proud that we added these two companies, it isn't enough. We're tracking over one hundred companies and there are a more that should be added soon. Adding a new company does take some extra work, but we need to find that time and make sure it gets done. Without further ado...

The Best Web Hosting Companies of 2013

Best Shared Web Host: A Small Orange

Best Web Hosting Support: SiteGround

Best Unmanaged VPS Provider: Digital Ocean

Best Managed VPS Provider: A Small Orange

A Small Orange continues to be the top web host that offers a broad range of hosting options. It was only beat out by newcomer, Digital Ocean, which provides very specific unmanaged SSD backed VPSes. And SiteGround is a new comer to our best of the year category. They eked out a less than 1% edge over A Small Orange in support rating. We would like to congratulate all of these companies on an excellent 2013 and hope that they continue their stellar performance in 2014.

I would also like to thank Cat Robinson for designing this year's awards. My favorite part of working with her was 'I don't know what a cute symbol is for VPS provider.' Me either. Thank you Cat.

*The way these scores were calculated were the same as last year. We only look at data collected in the 2013 calendar year, so there may be some differences in what you see on the site live, which keeps all data from all years versus this years rankings.

Let’s Talk About Touch

Photo Credit: Erick Pleitez

A touchpoint is the moment your company actually interacts with someone. It can be as simple as a customer picking your product up off a store shelf, seeing a super bowl ad, or a customer calling your support line. A consumers relationship with a company/brand is defined by the touchpoints they have had with it.

There are tons of explanatory diagrams if you search for touchpoints. Here's one I thought illustrated what and where they are clearly:

Source: http://b2bstories.com/?attachment_id=38/

So why am I writing about this?

Touchpoints are something I think about a lot with the web hosting industry. In fact, Review Signal is built upon one of the few touchpoints that exist between many web hosting customers and their providers. Twitter is one giant conduit for interactions.

Why I chose to write about this today specifically was an incident that was posted on reddit.

“I just want to share with the community my recent hosting experience with WiredWebWork.com.

I opened my account with them on January 25th, 2014 to host my personal portfolio website and to offer temporary hosting for my clients. The site has samples of all my past work and is essentially how potential clients become actual clients.

On Friday and Saturday (Feb 1st), I sent out 9 emails to various clients and potential clients about work they needed done. All afternoon Saturday I thought it was pretty weird that I hadnt heard back from a single email. Eventually I figured it was probably just people being people on Superbowl weekend and shook it off.

Late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, however you want to look at it, I tried to upload the changes I made to a clients website. FTP wouldnt connect. I opened up my browser and went to my site only to see cPanels "Account Suspended" page. What the hell I thought to myself. This cannot be right, so I head over to their website www.wiredwebwork.com to see if I can open a ticket. Their site shows the cPanel Maintenance page. Okay, I thought maybe they are having some technical issues, which it turns out they were. I proceeded to call them to try and see what exactly the problem is, even though I knew nobody would answer at 2am on a Saturday night. No big deal.

I head on over to Twitter to check and see if they have an account there. Sure enough, they do. Like any person familiar with social media would do, I sent the company (@wiredwebwork) a tweet asking about the down time.

http://i.imgur.com/Ob6GyGX.png

To me this was completely normal behavior. Before heading to bed I hopped on my phone to check if they had a Facebook account. Maybe they posted something there I thought. Turns out they had one, but didnt post anything so figured I would send them a quick message. Got a reply there saying that they had some harddrive failure. No big deal, things happen.

http://i.imgur.com/7E7y9rH.png

This morning I wake up and check my email to find out that my account was actually being closed today. Not because I didnt pay my bill (I do) instead they close my account because I sent them a tweet. Yes, that simple tweet I posted above got my account terminated.

http://i.imgur.com/qgVWtU4.png

Im not upset so much about the closing of the account. I'm upset about the comments in the email from the owner of the company.

"This message is to serve as notification that your account will be terminated from our network on or by February 2nd 2014. You will be given a full refund as well. If you have any questions or concerns, why not take them up with twitter as opposed to trying to contact the company directly.(I hope you detect the hint of sarcasm)."

Im also upset about the fact that I had potential clients going to my website and seeing an account suspended page. Talk about a major turnoff. I wouldnt hire me if I saw that. I'm mad about the time I spent talking with those clients, writing out email after email trying to get some more work.

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to share so that other people hopefully wouldnt run into the same problems as I did with wiredwebwork.”

The story can be summed up as follows:

Customer finds his website down
Customer tweets dissatisfaction to web hosting provider
Provider terminates account for tweeting about downtime
Provider (potentially) goes into self destruct mode in public forum

Conclusion

While this specific case may be noteworthy, I think the bigger picture is more interesting from an industry perspective. Web hosting companies are given few direct and controlled touchpoints with their customers. There are a huge amount of uncontrolled touchpoints; for example, every time the customer/the customer's customer uses the customer's website. The opinions people form of web hosting companies relies so heavily on these few touches that it would be crazy to squander them.

This is also why Review Signal is built around monitoring one of these critical touchpoints. I believe it's an accurate pulse on what customers really think about a company. Web hosting companies often ask me, 'How can we improve our ranking?' and the answer is always provide better service. Improving your touchpoints makes customers happier. My advice is don't squander such valuable opportunities to make a customer happy, especially when the conversation is happening in public. The repercussions of failing (or going out of your way to be awful to a customer) will hurt your brand.

Changing the Story, MediaTemple’s New Spin on GoDaddy’s SOPA Story

I run Review Signal to be an unbiased source of information about web hosting companies. I try to avoid injecting my personal opinions into the discussion about a web host's quality and service. I try to explain what I see in the data collected from hundreds of thousands of people.

However, there are rare moments when you just need to call a company out because the issue is so important.

Today, during a live Google Hangout Q&A, Russ Reeder, the President and COO of Media Temple said,

"The employees at GoDaddy never supported it. It was one person, who had a voice, and they are no longer at GoDaddy. It was an employee, it wasn't the core management."

I understand GoDaddy just purchased your company. I've watched your twitter account explode trying to prevent customers from leaving because of their acquisition. However, this just doesn't square with the story told during the actual SOPA incident.

Here's then GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman's statement,

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

And the full press release on the turn around, [emphasis added]

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

The statement from the CEO is slightly ambiguous, but the press office statement makes it pretty clear that they were working with SOPA legislation. GoDaddy and their General Counsel were working on this, there is no mention of one employee doing this without approval. They worked for months on SOPA legislation. The original statements don't make SOPA sound like some fringe issue, they are framing it as they were actively engaged in its crafting and have changed their judgement about the content/outcome of the legislation.

I tried to get an answer from Russ Reeder and Damian Sellfors, but they ended the Q&A session right before my question.

The rogue agent story that has been passed off today just doesn't match up well. For an issue like SOPA, which is near and dear to so many internet users, this type of spinning needs explanation and clarification.

If you want to sell out your company and earn millions of dollars, that's your prerogative (and congratulations on having enough money to do whatever you want for the rest of your life). All I ask is you be honest with your consumers.

GoDaddy Acquires Media Temple: The Good, The Bad and The Business

If you are following the tech or web hosting world at all today, you've probably heard about GoDaddy [reviews] buying Media Temple [reviews] which Tech Crunch announced earlier today. The news is evoking some very strong emotions and reactions from the community.

@iamelliot Because MediaTemple are absolutely definitely going to start powering their servers by burning elephant tusks.

— Ben Hodgson (@benhodgson) October 15, 2013

But emotions are only so interesting. Let's talk about the implications of this acquisition and how people might actually be affected by it.

The Good

The obvious winners here are the owners of Media Temple: Damian Sellfors and John Carey.

One of the biggest concerns that I've seen is that Media Temple will now go downhill. I don't know that this is guaranteed and it seems unlikely to happen overnight. I only have a few years of data, and only one company jumps to mind as a good comparison: A Small Orange [reviews].

A Small Orange were acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG) in March 2013. EIG, for those who don't know is the conglomerate that owns many major web hosting brands including BlueHost [reviews], HostGator [reviews], Host Monster [reviews] and more.

Most of the EIG brands do not have a great reputation. A Small Orange has had one of the best reputations since Review Signal has launched. So, I've been keeping a close eye to see what happens to their ratings as time goes on. They've continued to operate independently and their ratings have gone up in the past few months. That is the exact opposite of what many people would expect based on the acquisition.

I only have 6 months of data to look at so far, but the trends looks good for them. There may be a decline at some point, but the idea that a company that gets acquired immediately becomes bad isn't necessarily true. Which is good news for Media Temple customers.

The Bad

GoDaddy.

When the second question in your acquisition FAQ is "What about GoDaddy’s reputation in the tech community?" you have a problem.

The answer sends some confusing messages too:

GoDaddy has been transformed in recent months and is essentially a new company. If we did not like what we have seen, we would not have joined the GoDaddy family. They have overhauled their leadership team and attracted tech talent from the best-of-the-best. We love “the new GoDaddy” that CEO Blake Irving and his team have created, especially their new approach with advertising, product focus and UX.

Though neither GoDaddy’s brand nor operations are being integrated into ours, we are excited to be a positive influence on them with how to make even more improvements to better serve the Web pro community.

It's a new company, they are great, but we won't be integrating any of that greatness. In fact, they turn around and say they hope to influence GoDaddy positively, so Media Temple is better? All the data we have would agree with that argument.

As far as GoDaddy being a new and great company?

Not seeing it. It looks fairly stable at a mediocre level. Maybe more time will change that.

Virb and Founders

Another bad signal is both co-founders are leaving. They are also buying back Virb. There are a lot of flowery words about growth, dreams and better serving customers, but the actions seem to speak louder.

The Business

The web hosting industry continues to see consolidation. There appears to be two major players for the consumer market now: GoDaddy and Endurance International Group. They both seem willing to spend massive amounts of money to buy valuable brands.

Last year Media Temple had $52 million dollars in revenue [source]. So I would expect they sold out for 100's of millions considering growth, the cost of customer acquisition in the web hosting industry and low attrition rates.

Neither seems to be aggressively pursuing the growing developer market. There is a whole different set of competitors in the space like Amazon, RackSpace, Linode and Digital Ocean. Media Temple says they specialize in serving web professionals, but that's a slightly ambiguous term. This may be a slight push in the developer direction for GoDaddy, but I am not sure that the GoDaddy brand has much of a chance at making a headway in the developer space. It seems to evoke a lot of strong emotions (both rational and irrational). Using the Media Temple brand may be their only chance at getting any type of foothold.

For Consumers

I don't expect any dramatic changes right away. Media Temple should be on their absolute best behavior considering they know how bad the GoDaddy brand is and any legitimate reason to sow doubt would be amplified by the acquisition news.

A lot of people want to move on moral principles and that's reasonable. I would suggest taking a look at our web hosting reviews.

For those on the fence, locked-in or unable to afford a move, I wouldn't worry too much. We have yet to see any change in performance, it's likely to remain stable for a while.

Keeping an eye out for warning signs of declining performance at your web hosting company is always a good idea. This applies to any company, because over time, service and quality will vary at any company.

How to Deal With Web Hosting Failures and Outages

First off, it sucks. I am sorry that you have to go through the ordeal of downtime and web hosting failures.

There are a couple of facts about web hosting companies that everyone needs to realize:

1. Every web host has failures, given enough time. None are perfect.

2. Given 1, that doesn't mean every web host is the same. Some do better than others in handling situations. Different people will feel differently about how well a situation was handled, not everyone will be pleased. But in general, some companies handle failures better than others.

What happens after a failure

The company almost always apologizes. Sometimes they give their customers some type of compensation, often in the form of credit or payment forgiveness. Anything less than an apology should be an immediate warning sign.

Customers are then faced with a big decision.

Do you want to remain a customer of this company?

Some people will ditch the web host no matter what, given a good enough reason. Some will be locked in because of long term contracts or budgets. Some will be wondering what the future performance of the company will be like: was this a one off or a pattern? Everyone will make their own evaluations on these issues. People will see this outage differently. Choosing the right web hosting company is a personal decision. No web host is perfect for everyone.

I have a unique insight given the data I track here at Review Signal. My full time job is analyzing web hosting companies and what people think of them. I've watched multiple major outages and problems across different companies.

What generally happens is called regression to the mean. Simply put, the companies generally return to their pre-failure/outage service quality.

GoDaddy had a major DNS outage in September 2012. You can see a clear drop in rating and increased negative sentiment during and for a couple days after the event. However, within a week, things appear to be back to normal, their long-term overall rating is just under 50%.

HostGator experienced a major outage in August 2013. We can see a huge decrease in rating and a massive spike in the number of negative messages. However, within days, HostGator was receiving ratings above 60%, they were 62% before the crash.

That doesn't mean every company will always regress back to the mean. Failures and outages can often be signs of systemic or worsening problems. There are sometimes signs that you can look for to determine if this is something that simply happens or perhaps a sign of things to come. Here is a non-exhaustive list of potential warning signs:

Management Changes
Ownership changes
Degrading Service Quality (eg. slower response times, less knowledgeable customer service representatives)
New / Different Infrastructure
New / Different Software

So you still want to move or at least consider other options?

There are a lot of hosting companies out there. There are probably some even cheaper, there are some that have better reputations in different areas, there are some that might suit you better than your current provider. It's sometimes a good idea to look around just to make sure you're getting the best value.

When choosing a new web host people generally consider one of two options: asking friends or reading reviews. If you have a friend who knows the web hosting industry and you trust them to give you a good recommendation, that's often a good place to start. If you like reviews and trust a lot of opinions more than one person's opinion then finding reviews can be a better option.

I am biased here and I want to be upfront about that. This site (Review Signal) is a webhosting review site that works by tracking the opinions people share publicly on social media. That's where I get my data and insights, watching and reading all the recommendations and complaints against most of the major players in the web hosting space. All of the data we collect is published for free and available here. Each review is linked to the original posting source so you can verify it, or even reach out to that person if you really want. Review Signal's goal is to be the most honest and transparent review site in the industry and has more than 150,000 reviews (or ~100 times more than any of our competitors).

That said, there are other venues that you can look at too. Web Hosting Talk is the largest web hosting forum and has years of people talking about different companies. There is a ton of great information there and it's a great place for people interested in learning about web hosting as a business.

What should I be concerned about when looking for a new host?

There are a lot of considerations but I will list some of the major ones:

1. What do you need? The primary constraints of any site are software, hardware (disk space, cpu, memory/ram), and bandwidth. Unlimited sounds nice, but nothing is really unlimited and you don't need unlimited. Most sites don't need much at all. WordPress is only a few megabytes to put this into perspective. A high resolution photo is generally a few megabytes. Realistic goals and expectations can help make for a better hosting experience.

2. How do you expect to be supported when things go wrong or you need help? There are two primary categories of hosting: managed and unmanaged. Managed hosting means the provider manages the server for you and takes care of things like security updates and software updates. Please note this is on the server side, generally not the software you install yourself. When your server goes down, they fix it. Unmanaged hosting makes you responsible for doing these things. Most people aren't comfortable with that, but some are. If you decide you need managed, look at things like how you can get support: is it ticket system only? What about telephone? Is it 24/7? Test out the support. Try calling/emailing and asking a question. Was it fast? Easy? Did you like talking to the person? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you are going to be really pissed off when you're a customer and actually have a real problem. Maybe that company isn't right for you.

3. How much should I spend on hosting? There is no right amount. You should be asking yourself two questions, how much can I afford and makes sense? How much is what I am running on my website worth? If you have an online business making $1,000/day running on a $3/month hosting plan with poor support, you might want to re-think your plan. If you run a personal blog for fun with cat pictures you found on reddit and your mom is your only visitor, $3/month might be the right amount to spend on it (no offense to all the cat picture websites, the internet needs more of you <3 and take this cat picture offering).

4. There is no best host. Hosting companies are good at different things. Some specialize in very specific types of hosting and services while others are the best at being cheap. It really depends what you want and how you want to make trade-offs.

Conclusion

I tried to include some basic guidelines and help here for anyone considering the issues around a major catastrophe at a web hosting company. Not every situation is covered and getting specific help and recommendations is sometimes necessary. I am happy to answer any questions people might have and help any/all of you to the best of my ability. Please use our Talk to a Web Hosting Expert form to get started. If you are just interested in reading reviews, I suggest taking a look at our big list of providers, ratings and data available on our compare web hosting providers page.

Good luck and I hope this has helped!

-Kevin Ohashi

This post was inspired by the EIG outage [covered here 1, 2] and a comment I wrote on Mashable discussing the outage.

Photo credit: Nathan Reed.

Post Mortem of the EIG Outage (August 2, 2013) That Affected BlueHost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster

I first wrote about EIG's major outage as it was occurring and had to speculate on a few things before I had the data to support those guesses. This post is a more complete picture of what happened.

Recap

EIG had a major outage on August 2, 2013 that lasted for many hours because core switches in their Provo, Utah datacenter failed. This failure caused customers of BlueHost, HostGator, JustHost and HostMonster to be taken offline.

I speculated as to what would occur after the outage. How would the brands of the affected companies be perceived after such a catastrophic failure? I looked for a comparable event: the GoDaddy DNS outage in September 2012. What I observed from that event was a very quick return to normal volumes of messages and sentiment. GoDaddy regressed to the mean.

GoDaddy

The charts I used in my original post were lacking. I didn't have time to really collect and analyze all the data, especially sentiment. I could eyeball the historical data and see the ratings bounced back to their original levels but it wasn't a granular look.

This chart shows the actual outage, tweet volume and sentiment. It's immediately clear that negative sentiment has a huge spike. I also suspect that a lot of the positive messages are actually mis-categorized; Review Signal isn't perfect and things like sarcasm are one of the hardest things for the sentiment analysis algorithms to categorize. The unusual volume lasts three days and then quickly drops back to a normal looking pattern with perhaps a slightly higher baseline volume. The actual rating goes back to hovering around 50%, which GoDaddy's long-term graph hovers around as well.

Let's get back to the EIG outage and the affected brands. I am only going to talk about two of the brands, BlueHost and HostGator, in this post because on a granular level, the other two, HostMonster and JustHost, didn't have enough data. The brands without enough data will take more time to develop a clear picture about the effects of the outage.

BlueHost

bluehost_sentiment

I was wrong. So far at least. BlueHost had an overall rating of 57% before August 2. It hasn't broken 50% since the outage. BlueHost did not, or has not yet, regressed back to the mean. What's interesting is that the volume of tweets about BlueHost's outage was more than double in quantity to the similar GoDaddy outage, but they both quickly dropped back to normal volume within days of the event.

I will explore this a bit more, but to do that I need to show you the other brand.

HostGator

HostGator's outage looks almost identical to GoDaddy's outage. Around 1000 negative messages on the day of the outage and back to normal within days. HostGator appears to have regressed to the mean as quickly as GoDaddy, its rating has been over 60% two days, which are pre-crash levels, where its average rating was 62%. HostGator behaved exactly as I predicted.

Weird Conclusions and Speculations

Why hasn't BlueHost regress to the mean? One explanation, which I was alerted to by a kind reader (Thanks Linda!), is that not all of HostGator's customers were in the Provo, UT data center. So the outage may have disproportionately affected BlueHost customers compared to HostGator customers. BlueHost is also the larger hosting company by number of customers, although not domain count.

That explanation may explain the volume difference, but I don't think it explains the regression to the mean for one brand and not the other. Presumably the affected customers of both brands should be equally upset. Those lingering feelings should last equally long for both groups of customers.

I can't explain why we haven't seen BlueHost regress, but I can point out a few differences between this outage and the GoDaddy comparison which may be factors. One important factor is duration. GoDaddy's outage lasted 4-5 hours according to reports. The EIG outage lasted from the morning of August 2 until 9 PM. They were reporting 'intermittent instability' into August 3 according to their official website.

I could speculate that the combination of severity, duration and size of the affected brand has caused some sort of more permanent brand damage to BlueHost, but I think that's premature. BlueHost hasn't regressed yet, but I still think it will eventually. A company that large, with such a huge brand and marketing infrastructure will probably recover. I will be watching BlueHost carefully for the next few weeks or months along with the smaller brands to see if it happens. If it doesn't, this will be an interesting case study in branding, communication and perhaps social media.

Thank you for reading and if you have any ideas, feedback or suggestions please leave them in the comments below.

Service Interrupted: A Look at the EIG (BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, JustHost) Outage through Twitter

I woke up today and quickly found out that one of the major players in the hosting space was having a massive outage. According to their own blog:

During the morning of August 2, 2013, Endurance International Group’s data center in Provo, UT experienced unexpected issues that impacted customers of bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster and JustHost. Company websites and some phone services were affected as well.

That sounds bad. Really bad. But how bad? Let's take a look at the data:

It's pretty clear that today was an outlier. A major outlier for all the affected companies.

Our data collection system here at Review Signal collected over 35,000 tweets today alone about these four companies. That is roughly 14 times the normal amount.

Interestingly enough, there are some very understanding customers out there too, it wasn't all negative.

How has it affected their rankings?

I must first note that most messages don't make it through our spam filtering systems for a variety of reasons. So despite there being over 35,000 tweets, we did not get 35,000 new reviews. Many of the messages were not up to our quality standards, eg. retweets, spam, duplicate messages and news. If you are interested in learning more about how we calculate scores and what kinds of messages count see our How It Works section.

BlueHost

I am not sure why, but BlueHost was impacted a lot more than it's bigger brother HostGator. BlueHost has 1.9 million domains on their server. They also received over 15,000 tweets about them today (50% more than HostGator).

BlueHost was rated at 57% (Overall Rating) from over two years worth of data collected. Today they dropped 8% to 49%. There were over 1,500 negative reviews today (Note: Our data was calculated early to write this article, the day isn't fully over yet).

HostGator

HostGator is the largest of the bunch and has 2.15 million domains under management. They seemed to have fared the storm better than their brothers with less tweets about them in absolute number and relative to their size.

HostGator was rated at 62% (Overall Rating) and dropped 5% to 57%. HostGator received approximately 700 negative reviews today.

HostMonster and JustHost

These are the babies of the bunch, HostMonster has 'only' 700,000 domainso and JustHost has barely over 350,000.

HostMonster went from a 56% (Overall Rating) to 48%, which is a 8% decline. JustHost dropped from 46% to 41%, a total of 5%.

Conclusion

Today was a pretty awful day for all the companies above but some were affected more than others. I don't have any answer as to why that might be. There are many plausible theories such as perhaps there were more BlueHost customers in the Provo, UT data center than the other companies. But without further information, it's only speculation. UPDATE: I was told BlueHost actually has more customers than HostGator, even if HostGator customers have more domainers. A simple explanation as to why BlueHost was impacted more.

What I can say is a major screw up definitely impacts a company's reputation. But large companies seem to regress to the mean.

GoDaddy is a good comparison. They had a major DNS outage around September 11-12. It left a noticeable dip on the overall rating but it seemed to bounce back. February's dip is the super bowl effect that brings a lot of attention to them (more negative than positive, but attention nonetheless). The long-term volume of tweets also doesn't appear to be affected after a few days.

If we use GoDaddy as a benchmark, these companies will probably be back to their usual levels of service within a week, but today and the next couple days will leave a very long term impact on their rating at Review Signal.

Introducing Digital Ocean – Low Cost SSD VPS Provider

We are happy to announce Digital Ocean has been added to Review Signal today.

Read our 1,200+ Digital Ocean Reviews or use Promo Code SSDTWTTR to get $10 Free Credit.

Digital Ocean is a relatively new provider in the cloud vps hosting space and has skyrocketed in popularity (over 5,000% in the past six months!). It seems that their explosive growth is backed up by the data we've collected. Digital Ocean has an overall rating of 81% at the this time. That's the highest rated web hosting company on Review Signal at the time of writing.

As of yesterday, Digital Ocean has opened up a second data center in New York (NY2) and now offers San Franciso, New York and Amsterdam as locations. Their plans start at $5/month for a 512MB (RAM) and 20GB SSD of space.

Congratulations and welcome to Digital Ocean!

What did people say about GoDaddy’s 2013 Super Bowl Ad?

Many of us watched the Super Bowl last night. Some of us even watched only to see the commercials. GoDaddy made a tremendous impact this year. They received 290,000 tweets from the Super Bowl. We here at Review Signal got curious, what did people say about GoDaddy?

(Click to View in Full Size)

Where did this data come from?

We used our sample of ~27,000 tweets and found the most popular words used when talking about GoDaddy. The bigger the word(s) the more commonly used they were to describe.

Watch The Commercial

The Best of 2012 – Reflections and Awards

It's been an exciting year at Review Signal. We launched in September. It's been going well and we have really enjoyed the feedback from our users. Thank you to everyone who has visited, reached out and help us along the way.

We wanted to end the year with a look back through our data and recognize some exceptional companies that stood out this year.

Best Overall Web Host: A Small Orange

A Small Orange have consistently had the highest rating of any company all year. Their rating for the year ended at a 77% Overall Rating. Their customers have been simply raving about them.

However, one new specialty hosting company did eclipse them in November.

Best Specialty Web Host: WPEngine (WordPress Hosting)

WPEngine was a late addition to our system and it got a huge number of reviews very quickly. The consensus was that WPEngine is pretty good with an Overall Rating of 80%.

One of the biggest differentiators for hosting companies these days is the support. We wanted to recognize two companies that had the best service ratings. We separated them into managed and unmanaged because of the very different nature of each offer. We ran into some issues where some companies had high ratings but very few actual reviews related to it. To normalize for volume we applied a Wilson Score interval, so some companies may appear to have higher support scores but the confidence in those is lower because there were only a few reviews making up that rating.

Best Managed/Unmanaged Hosting Support: LiquidWeb / Linode

LiquidWeb Best Managed Support Hosting Linode Best Unmanaged Support Hosting

Both LiquidWeb and Linode have very passionate customers and are near the top in Overall Rating as well as having the highest Support Ratings in their respective categories. Linode has a passionate fanbase in the developer community who seem more than happy to manage their own VPSs. LiquidWeb's customers are generally in the managed Dedicated and VPS categories.

We congratulate each of these companies on an excellent 2012 and hope their performance only continues to improve in 2013.