You can see the hosting video featured at Daw. It is about those so-called hosting directories who claim to be “hosting reviews sites” while just offer advertising for overselling hosts through affiliate networks or paid programs. This is something that makes web hosting to look “dirty industry” and produces unhappy site owners. Do you know which one is the next grubby field of online activity?
The hosting directories mentioned above have already become “Spam farms” created to target consumers to particular shared hosting companies. Although Google does what’s possible not to rank those sites among top search results, they still appear in attractive positions. The Search Engine can not permanently change its ranking system only to keep spammers away from search results.
Blogs get grubby
Shared web hosting has become a grubby business. Another field of human activity – blogging – is changing from what used to be – a personal experience – to highly commercialized activity. Today you can find blogs created only to talk about making money and even worse, blogs made only to squeeze some money from internet users.
When I decided to create Daw I wanted to have a blog recognized from people invlolved in web hosting industry. For the last 2 years I’ve received at least 10 advertising requests from shared web hosts to feature them here. The reason I rejected them was that each of them was on one of other way involved in overselling. I turned down offers for total value of $22,000 for the last 20 months and belive me I wouldn’t change my mind if I need to start over. The choise was simple to get money and to mislead consumers or to stay away from this.
Unfortunately there are increasing number of bloggers who agree to post paid reviews and refer products or services because they get paid for this. There are many “Review programs” which stimulate bloggers to spam consumers by posting commercial articles and “reviews”. This a good way for anyone who has a popular blog to make some money. At the same time this is a practice which “corrupts” bloggers. Why? Because they get money to recommend something they never used.
It is reasonable to review a company if you know something about it and if you at least made some test on their products or services. My advice to bloggers is “Do not recommend anything you didn’t used!”. Otherwise you may harm your reputation.
