If you are looking for a good cheap Web Host to host your web site you will literally find 1000's of sites with reviews and awards for web hosting providers. Be careful with how much trust you put into these reviews and awards, a huge percentage of them are not serious and are nothing more than a creative marketing trick to get you to buy hosting.

Reviews of existing customers are of course very valuable when buying any kind of product, and definitely for web hosting. You know this, I know this, and advertisers know this which is why they use fake reviews. Most often it is not the web host company itself that stands behind such fake reviews, instead it is some middleman that stands to earn a buck by referring customers to a host.

So how do you know which reviews are fake and which are real? Well, if they sound to good to be true they probably are. No company can deliver 100% quality 100% of the time and make 100% of it's customers happy. Unhappy customers are always the loudest ones, if you like a product you are less likely to go online and say so than if you hate it. So if all reviews are super positive then that is a good indication that they are either fake or that the reviews are at least very carefully chosen to hide the unflattering ones. To see a good mix of good and bad reviews just check any book on Amazon, as much as a book can be loved it can be hated, and it is the same with web hosting. The bad reviews are usually more useful since they tend to tell you the weaknesses of a certain web host, and knowing these makes you a smarter consumer.

Another giveaway is fake hosting reviews often sound very similar, suspiciously like they were written by the same person. If a hosting review site has the review ?Great host, great service. A great buy that I really recommend!? for 10 different hosting providers then something is wrong. Use your common sense and be a bit careful of how much trust you put into reviews like this. Also be aware if there positive reviews for all hosts listed on an ?independent hosting review? site, surely some hosting providers must be better and worse than others. They can not all be great.

Another thing to be arware of are all these Web Hosting Awards that you bump into when you are researching your hosting. Keep in mind that all you need to create a Web Hosting Award is some design and some marketing skills. There is no government controlled Central Web Hosting Awards Association that guarantees that each web hosting award actually awards the best host and that the award is anything more than a fake marketing ploy. Before you trust any award make sure that you who is behind the Award and what criteria that has been used to award a certain host (?paying most for banner space? isn't that useful for you as a consumer). Just as for reviews, common sense and a healthy bit of skepticism will enable you to look behind the marketing hype quite easily.

To get the best insight to what service a web hosting company really provide the best way is to take a look at the hosts support forums. Usually these can be found via the hosts homepage, otherwise just search for them on Google. In the forums you will be able to read about the problems people really have and what the hosts customers really think about the service provided. Again, be aware that the unhappy customers will be loudest, so there will always be more negative than positive posts. The key for you at this point though is that you know for sure that the information you are getting is real and not just marketing language.

To sum up...

- Be careful on who you trust when it comes to web hosting reviews and awards

- Be aware that there are a lot of sites that use reviews and awards as advertising and not to provide a good independent service

- Use your common sense when you do your research of web hosts

Being a smart and informed consumer will get you good hosting that you will be happy with for a long time.