Webhosting Service Unbiased Comparison

Finding useful webhosting information is next to impossible. Most of the big, brand-name webhost companies out there offer very sizable pay to affiliates who refer people to their service. That means that almost every single comment on the entire Internet about which web hosting services are good and which web hosts are bad is tainted by a giant conflict of interest.

I’ll try and spare you the details of how I know this, or why my freelance writing business and I are innocent (but, really I am.)

If you happen to see any webhosting advertisements while you are reading this article, please note that those are Google AdSense ads and that:

• a) I have no control over which ads do or do not show up, so I neither endorse, recommend, nor condemn whoever’s advertisements are showing up there
• b) while I do get paid by Google if someone clicks on one of those ads, I do not get any sort of affiliate marketing pay from the webhost ads
• c) if someone does click, may payout for that action from Google will only be a dollar or two, furthermore, that pay rate would be the same regardless of who or what is clicked, so there is no reason for me to choose one over another
• d) there are no affiliate links to webhosts of any kind on this page (or on this whole site as far as memory serves)

Hopefully, this fully demonstrates my impartiality in this manner at this time 🙂

Google Uses Speed For Search Rankings

Google recently announced that it is now using the speed with which a website loads as part of the algorithm that ranks websites in their search engine results pages (aka SERPs). It won’t be long before Google has to go back on this, just like they did with how they said they would handle no-follow links, because the truth is that the junkiest, slimiest, most prolific spammers, tricksters, and charlatans on the Internet use blazing fast web servers in order to scam the most people possible in a given amount of time.

In other words, using speed as a ranking factor benefits those that should not get high Google rankings the most. Whether Google announces this rollback or not remains to be seen, but I would count it as unlikely.

However, the good news is that in order to allow webmasters, content publishers, and writers making money online with websites to see how their website’s speed is affecting their rankings, Google has included a new tool in the Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools.

The value of this new utility is not in improving your PageRank or anything of the sort, but rather in seeing how an impartial, third-party, and a very important one at that, thinks your website is doing in terms of speed.

More to the point, this tool allows you to see how good your webhosting plan is.

If you have more than one website, or if you have two webhosts, you can run the Google search engine Site Performance tool on both of your websites and compare how fast they load. Obviously, the more similar the websites are, the more valid the comparison. However, two WordPress blogs with approximately the same number of plug-ins running on similar themes should be close enough for a broad comparison.

Making judgments based upon a half-second or other tiny difference probably isn’t wise, but if one webhost company is giving you sub-one-second times on the Google Site Performance Graph while another hosting company is giving you over three-second load times (or worse) on a similarly sized site, you have your answer about which webhost plans are good WordPress webhosts and which ones are crappy WordPress hosting companies.