My answer to this would be an emphatic NO, these review sites are all there to make money and simply give the highest rating to the hosts who pay the most. And as far as any reviews go, these can just as easily be made up by either the review site or the host as no real validation  takes place on most of these sites other than to maybe send out a verification email to the specified email address, which only goes to prove that the poster did not use a fake address.  Many of these sites will also doctor the reviews to favour the paying advertisers, notice that almost all host review sites have the same companies in their top 10. Just take a look at http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/ for some real dirt.

There are of course some exceptions, such as Ben Forta's site which has a ColdFusion ISP review section, and you can feel pretty safe that Ben does not fiddle the reviews and he does not offering any advertising, additionally the reviews also provide links to the reviewers email address so you can easily contact them and confirm if the review is true. You do have to use the OLD HTML versions of the ISP list as I have linked to rather than the newer Flash forms version which does not have the email links. If you can find other review sites that meet this criteria then the chances of them being legit are going to be much more likely.

I have dealt with a few of the most well known host review sites, and it is amazing what they can offer you for a bit of cash. To date I have not really found any host review site other than Ben's which I would actually take seriously as a customer, which is a shame as I know a lot of people do make decisions based on the information they find on these sites, which often turns out to be a bad decision.

I recently came across  www.webhostingstuff.com which is quite well known as a scam site and is mentioned on http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/. On this site I found an extremely scathing review of my hosting company (CFMX Hosting). Now while I accept that you cannot please all of the people all of the time and every company is going to get some bad reviews no matter how good they are, this one was extremely defamatory, contained a lot of untrue facts and was also rather personal, which I thought was very fishy, so I decided to look up the customer and see what we (or I) had done to upset him so. It turned out that the review was completely fake as we had never had any customer with that name (James Keen), and his web site adventure2abroad.com did not even exist (domain not even registered). 

In addition to this, I do not actually have any memory of registering with webhostingstuff.com and was not able to login with any email address or use the password reminder option.

So myself and Rob our sales director contacted the owner of webhostingstuff.com (Michael Foo of W3Centric Network Pte Ltd) several times and asked him to not only remove the fake review but also remove any mention of our company from his web site.

We never received any response from him and then found that our IP addresses had been blocked stopping us from viewing the web site and thus his nefarious activities, hmm very dodgy indeed.

Even more suspect is that while I have been monitoring this site I have seen other legitimate customer reviews appear and have also posted comments myself, only for them to promptly be deleted the next day leaving only the fake defamatory review.

A bit of googling shows that this site is not providing a legitimate web host review service, and the fact that the owner is based in Singapore (a common source of spam, scams, hackers) rather enforces that fact. He simply gets paid by hosting companies to make them look good and to make rival companies look bad with fake reviews and low ratings. This site is not the only one employing these tactics either.

So my advice, if you are looking for a new host, look for referrals from friends or colleagues or perhaps try asking for recommendations on discussion lists or forums, stay away from the host review sites.

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