Web Hosting Forums: The Secret to finding good web hosting

Whether you're looking for shared web hosting or a dedicated server, the secret to finding a good web host is to get a feel for the people that run a web host by reading their own words.

Below is a list of official public forums run by web hosts (contact me if I'm missing one). Check out the forums for yourself and see which employees post, determine their technical competency, how they solve problems, how they treat customers, etc.

This method worked for me back in 1996 when I found BEST.COM (now Verio) by reading the exploits of BEST's Matt Dillon in the ba.internet newsgroup. Now 9 years later, I'm resuming the search and sharing my methods.

Good luck to us all,

Spencer Low

Official Web Hosting Forums in alphabetical order

The statistics below were gathered in December 2005.
Web Host Name Web Site Forum Members Max Online Threads Posts
Burst.NET Web Site Forum 1,535 265 3,476 20,921
CrystalTech Web Site Forum 4,997 - 12,475 69,258
DiscountASP.NET Web Site Forum - - 2,361 8,456
DotNetPark Web Site Forum 461 15 436 1,482
EV1Servers Web Site Forum 8,761 1,971 56,970 359,796
Fluid Hosting Web Site Forum 651 158 2,533 14,260
JodoHost Web Site Forum 3,231 483 5,651 31,459
Layered Technologies Web Site Forum 1,761 200 2,477 13,145
ServerBeach Web Site Forum 2,377 639 5,536 31,790
ServerDivision Web Site Forum 111 16 82 319
ServerMatrix Web Site Forum 5,980 1,127 16,876 141,742
SuperbServers Web Site Forum 768 57 362 1,277
WebHost4Life Web Site Forum 252 - 199 355

WebHostingTalk.com open discussion forum

Another useful resource to to hear what customers are saying about web hosts, outside of an official company-run forum.