OC(UK) Host Review :-)

[Adz]

Inspired by this thread and the many other recent "which hosting is best?" type threads, I spent my free afternoon today creating this:

www.ochostreview.co.uk

The idea is that OcUK members can suggest hosting companies (or domain registration, dedicated servers, etc...) which users can them post comments, reviews and ratings against. In future, people who have never bought webhosting before will hopefully be able to look upon this as a useful and wholly unbiased resource.

It will be moderated and any blatantly fake (or abusive, slanderous, etc) posts will be removed.

The only person not allowed to have any input is myself, for obvious reasons. To the rest of you, I'd be grateful for your input.

I have endulged in a couple of light tipples this evening and it was rather rushed so some of the code may be a little dodgy. If anything looks wrong, please let me know.

It's also very, very basic at the moment. Any suggestions for improvements or new features would be appreciated.

 

[Adz]

/me waits for the "sponsored by 2host" animated GIF popups

Hehe, ain't gonna happen . It certainly won't be 'sponsored' by us, nor will it be sponsored by any other hosting company.

Pixel - looks fine mate, might be helpful if you added a review too though....

Edit: You'll notice once someone posts a review that the hosts are ordered by rating - any new companies posted will end up at the bottom. If any accidental duplicate submissions are noticed, they will be merged.

 

[Adz]

EDIT - Why havent the links to the companys i posted about been linked properly?

You've missed the http:// (I've modified the submit form now). I'll edit yours for you.

 

[Adz]

Question - does anybody think that a threaded "comment on this review" type system would be handy or would that make it a little too much like a forum (messy and confusing)?

 

[Adz]

I'm recording the IP addresses so if someone were to rate everything '1', it would be blatantly obvious and I could simple do a:

DELETE FROM host_reviews WHERE ipaddr = '127.0.0.1'

 

[Adz]

You're thinking of VISA

Eventually I was thinking I might mail a link (perhaps with a hash of the current unix time or something) to the user which allows them to edit their submission (new host submissions, not comments).

 

[Adz]

/me points Jon in the general direction of the "submit a host" button....



I'm not sure exactly how I feel about having any of our brands listed. If there were any derogotary/spammy/blatantly untrue comments that I would normally remove, I'd have to think twice about removing them from our listing in case I was (quite rightly) accused of fiddling the results...

 

[Adz]

Thanks for your support and input guys, seems to be going well so far .

At the moment, hosts are sorted by average rating and then by the number of ratings. This does however means that a host with one 10/10 rating will be shown above a host with 1000 ratings and an average of 9.9. I'm trying to think of a way around this - suggestions welcome.

 

[Adz]

Something along those lines would be good but doing ($average_score * $number_of_reviews) wouldn't work as it would mean that a site with 8x 3/10 reviews would be ranked above a site with 2x 10/10 reviews.

I think I might just give the option to sort by number of reviews and see how that works. At the moment it's not really an issue as there aren't many hosts to choose from anyway.

 

[Adz]

Looks good Adz, very useful.

Yesterday I signed up univote.co.uk with Registron - that's a company you own right? - just wanted to say I was very impressed with the speed the domain and hosting was up and running in. Ordered Friday late night, and it was up and running Saturday morning.

Nick

Yup . The entire system is 100% automated from start to finish, takes about 10 seconds to process in total.

 

[Adz]

There's nothing against that in the rules but obviously 'reviewing' your own site will be noticed.

 

[Adz]

The Reg1 review? I'm not sure how that happened. Perhaps he forgot he posted it...

Deleting it now .

 

[Adz]

The rules say that only OcUK members can submit a host for review, they don't state who can post reviews. Does anyone have any views on this, one way or the other? Restricting it to OcUK members without access to the database would be somewhat hard to maintain....

 

[Adz]

That's what the "OcUK username" field is for when you submit a review....

 

[Adz]

Done. I think that's going to happen more and more often as the list grows - I might have to put some kind of check in place.

 

[Adz]

With regards to the "OcUK members only" type thing, you could always do a slightly complicated system but one that works. Generate a hash, then ask the user to insert that has into their profile, in one of the fields such as AIM name or ICQ number. Ask them for their name, and then fetch their profile page - if the hash is present, then they're a member, if it isn't then they're not Works well for members-only external sites on rather well known forum I visit.

That's a nice idea but it is a little long winded. I'm not sure if it would put users off voting if we made them jump through too many hoops.

If OcUK wanted to let me verify users against the database, they could always punch a hole in their firewall and allow me select privileges only.

I don't think non-OcUK ratings will be too much of an issue though. 'Spam' will be easy to spot and the site won't be promoted outside of this forum anyway.

 

[Adz]

If people wanted to have a go at the design, I'd have no objections but I think it works quite well as it is. I'm not looking to create an all singing, all dancing, flashy website - just a simple database of "OcUK approved" hosting companies .

Btw, unknowndomain, I hope you don't mind but I've edited your k1z submission for accuracy. I really should get something done about that logo but it's such a small concern I haven't found the time.

 

[Adz]

Just the name...to 'k1z' .

 

[Adz]

I'm a little concerned by the fact that over half of the sites listed (that I know of) are owned by or affiliated with OcUK members. That's not necessarily a bad thing but some variety would be nice guys .

Thanks for the stars .

Edit: Daz is right on the pronunciation. When I get around to it that site will be renamed, rebranded, redesigned, merged with another budget host I'm in the process of buying out and promoted like crazy. Watch this space.

 

[Adz]

This wont affect me rite?

Of course not .

To this joker, *sigh* . I didn't filter out HTML tags as I assumed OcUK users were mature enough not to abuse it. I'll delete your post when I can be arsed. Thankyou for your contribution though .

I'll be adding a "sort by" option later tonight.

I seem to be helping to promote a direct competitor in Reg1/Serverstream - I didn't quite invisage them getting so many votes . I thought I had a lot of clients on the forums! Thumbs up though, they must be good.