Review: Web Hosting Pal

I’m going to try an experiment. I signed up for a ReviewMe account to see if it’s a viable source of, well, coffee money (cuz let’s face it, I don’t blog often enough to consider this a career option). My first paid review will be of a Web Hosting review service called Web Hosting Pal.

For the record, I’m really glad ReviewMe doesn’t require positive reviews. I’m sorry Web Hosting Pal, I’m really trying to find something positive about your site, but I’m left wanting. So perhaps you can consider this constructive criticism.

Value Proposition

Web Hosting Pal’s value proposition is simple: they provide reviews of web hosts. As an idea, it’s a good one. Their execution of the idea though… well…

Each review is pretty lengthy and looks more like marketese than an unbiased review. This is bad, because marketese is “detested” by users. It gets worse too. The review is littered with underlined red text (underlining non-link text is bad bad bad!) Choice sentences are in bold, though they aren’t good summary sentences. And all that text becomes a sea of gray with blobs of red and blue.

But to their credit, there’s a table in the left column that lists the web host’s details. Tables of data are useful when making comparisons like this. Web Hosting Pal does provide such a table for their top 10 rated web hosts, but it doesn’t contain a great deal of information, nor do they allow you to customize what’s being compared. Again, it comes off more like marketese than objective data.

Perhaps the site is new, but there isn’t much content on it right now. As I write this, I count only eight reviews. They don’t even include my web host, Dreamhost, which is a fairly popular one (they even have a Wikipedia entry!).

New content seems to come from the site’s writers and external readers, which they solicit through a a contact form. I hope they’re able to get some reviews this way. Or that they write up some reviews soon.

There’s also a three-section beginner’s guide on web hosting basics, domain name basics, and email hosting. Unfortunately, none of these sections have any content yet. Just a big, “Sorry this page is updating….” message.

Meta Information

According to Alexa, they’ve been around since Jan. 26, 2003. Since that time, they’ve been able to earn a Google PageRank of 4. Since there’s so little content, I’m guessing the site has undergone a major redesign recently, or perhaps changed owners.

A peek at Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that this design has been up since Oct. 29, 2005. Okay, so they haven’t had a major redesign recently. New owners? Or have they just sat on the site & its spare content since then? That would make me wonder why they’ve gotten a ReviewMe account.

How They Look

In a word: unprofessional. Very 2005. The site does not look trust-worthy at all. In fact, it reeks of sleaze, like some guy in a basement somewhere threw this up just to harvest your email or get you to randomly click on hidden ads or something. There’s even a misspelling in the heading, “Do You Know That You Can Host Multiple Websites On One Wosting Account Now!” It’s “Hosting” not “Wosting”. (I realize the misspelling may be intentional though, for SEO reasons.)

The client-side code isn’t even optimized for search engines. No use of web standard HTML, no headers, and lots of font elements (which clashes with their CSS). The code wasn’t generated by Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, so that means someone hand-coded this outdated piece of work. I hope they pick up a copy of Web Standards Solutions soon.

Business Model

So how are these guys making money? Why are they paying for reviews? The most obvious answer is by referring customers to the web hosts they’ve reviewed. That’s a bit of a conflict of interest, as they’re likely to funnel customers to the best paying web hosts. This is just conjecture, of course. But the site looks untrustworthy enough for me to assume this. There are no reassurances otherwise.

However, none of the links to the web hosts contain the normal identifiers you see in affiliate links. So perhaps they have a deal where each web host combs their referrer logs to see how many customers have come from Web Hosting Pal. If that’s the case, I wonder what the overhead is in resolving click report conflicts between Web Hosting Pal and these web hosts.

My Suggestions

This review has been pretty damn critical of Web Hosting Pal. If you guys are listening, I think your product is rather sub-par right now.

But all is not lost. You have a PR4, quite a number of backlinks, and are climbing the ranks of Alexa. This means you have SEO potential, if you play your cards right.

1. Hire a professional web designer and give your site an overhaul. Make it look more professional, trustworthy, and most importantly – usable. Look through a few of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns if necessary.

2. Do some research to determine what information is critical to a user trying to decided between different web hosts. This can be as easy as sending out a survey or polling a bunch of your webmaster friends.

3. Hire a writer to rewrite your reviews and make them web-friendly. Add the writer’s name to the review to make them more authentic. Provide some credentials and information about your writer(s) too.

4. Retool your site so that it’s possible for users to search and filter their results based on the criteria that’s important to them. Organize more of your data into tables with sortable rows.

5. If you’re going to collect reviews from readers, improve your contact form so it asks for enough appropriate information to make a truly useful review.

6. Hire a professional web developer to make your site more SEO-friendly. Have this developer rewrite your HTML and CSS, build (or install) a CMS to help you efficiently publish new reviews, add a sitemap file, etc.

7. Add a way for readers to vote on each web host. Right now, it’s not clear how certain web hosts are rated as “best” while others are not. If you give your readers a way to participate with your site with ratings & reviews, you may increase its stickiness a bit (though there are always pitfalls with user participation).

8. Put together a content acquisition plan. This can include #3, where you hire more writers. Or it could be a section of your marketing plan where you aim to get more user-submitted reviews.

9. Put together a marketing plan. The beginner’s guide is a good place for customer acquisition via SEO, since it’s a content-rich section. You can also do things like ReviewMe (which you’re doing already), , link trading with other web host directories (which you’re doing already too), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, etc.

10. Put together an internal dashboard to organize and measure all of your outgoing links (which hopefully are affiliate links that are generating income for you) and clickthrough paths throughout your site.

11. Once you start sending significant customer traffic to your web hosts, negotiate for better rates with them. Even an increase in a few cents could mean a nice chunk of change.

Good luck, Web Hosting Pal!