wow, love this. may actually be the first web hosting review site I would ever look at. I get more spam on my blog from web hosting review sites than anyone. not sure why but seems like you have a lot of blackhat competition.

love your site & framework. good luck! Will share.

Thank you! The competition is incredibly black hat. Try running the sites listed for 'web hosting reviews' under some SEO tools and it's often very clear which black hat strategies they are using (blog spamming, edu/gov spam, etc). I haven't been able to crack the top search terms yet because it's incredibly competitive and it's not a level/fair playing field. But working on creating some interesting content and building high quality links will hopefully pay off in the long run.

I am always open to ideas and suggestions for how to market this better. And I appreciate you sharing it!

Thanks for sharing - this is awesome. I've had an incredibly hard time finding good hosting service reviews.

Glad you like it. It really is hard. You can read a lot of reviews and people will say contradictory stuff. One of the biggest takeaways from looking at all the data I've collected is that no company is even close to perfect. These services are pretty hard to compare apples to apples because there are a lot of touch points dealing with customers. The human interactions are hard to quantify. Sometimes a hard drive dies and you catch a support rep on a shitty day. You may have a really bad experience. Is that normal or just an outlier? It's really hard to tell without enough data. So I try and grab as much of it as possible and publish it transparently. My hope is that it is useful and people end up at companies they are more satisfied with, let the good guys benefit from treating people properly rather than paying the highest commission and locking people in.

I don't know anything, but when I think of reviews I think about this: http://hammerprinciple.com/

Maybe it is interesting for you to know, maybe not. Probably not.

That's pretty neat frontpage. I am a bit confused as to what it's doing, who's doing it and why. But it seems like a neat idea.

Interesting. You make a living from this? Is it all SEO driven?

Yeah, I've been working on it for 3 years, in the past year it's been able to support me. It's not a lot of money, but it's enough that I can subsist on it. It also doesn't eat my time 100% anymore, I can do some consulting on the side when I feel like it. I'm actually just traveling in south asia now, trying to live cheap and seeing if I can work from anywhere.

As far as SEO, I get some SEO traffic although most of it is to blog posts that aren't that related to web hosting. The most popular ones are about creating a reverse proxy/caching server with nginx and long running processes in php. web hosting review seo is super competitive and I'm nowhere near the front page for most terms unfortunately.

Thanks for the info. Inspiring. So you have other traffic sources apart from SEO?

I have honest to god links, which actually still send traffic (amazing, right?). I also get some from social sources. I apparently get a bunch of direct traffic too... no idea where/why they are coming, but some days it's pretty good. Today's direct traffic is probably all HN.

I love the mad-lib style form on the home page.

I assum it converts well?

It really depends on the traffic source/quality honestly. For some it can be exceptionally helpful (ie you have no idea what you need). For the HN crowd I linked directly to the data because I figured people would be far more comfortable with that.

I sent you a contact form email. =)