As a result of my writing and research I am often looking into the customer satisfaction of various website hosting companies. There are a number of tools available for this type of research. We’ve probably all used a Google search to research web hosting at one point or another. The latest in the arsenal of tools for detecting customer dis-satisfaction with a webhost is Twitter.
So how do we check on the quality of a web hosting company using Twitter? We’ll take a look at a few US webhosting firms and two UK hosting companies. Here are a few suggestions.
Check the Twitter feed of the company itself – To find a company (or person) on Twitter go to the ‘Find’ page here: http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter. Type in the company name and examine the results. Often there may be more than one suggestion for the company you are trying to find. You may even need to go to the Twitter account and view the content to determine if this is, in fact, the company you were searching for.
For example, I was trying to find the company ‘GoDaddy’ on Twitter. Using the find page above yielded the following results: http://twitter.com/search/users?q=Go+Daddy&category=people&source=find_on_twitter. The first two search results are the real Go Daddy – http://twitter.com/GoDaddyGuy and http://twitter.com/GoDaddyDeals. Oddly, the Twitter account at Twitter.com/GoDaddy looks like someone has ‘squatted’ on GoDaddy’s name (probably not the real company). As you will see if you look at most hosting company Twitter feeds, they tend to be very self-promotional. So they are going to be of limited value in deciding if a company treats its customers right. To get the real inside scoop on hosting companies, you’ll need to search a different way.
Perform a Twitter search by the company name – To get the real story on what current customers think at any given time about a website hosting company’s service, go here: http://search.twitter.com. That’s the Twitter search box. Type in the name of the company you’re interested in (or a close variation) and check the results.
It’s fun to compare two companies at the extremes of the service spectrum and see the difference in the Twitter feeds, or to see who’s doing better among companies that compete with each other. For example – compare Rackspace, HostMySite and The Planet:
Let’s compare a couple of UK companies that compete head to head, website hosting company 34SP.com and Fasthosts. Which one would you think better judging from the Twitter research?
I hope that this tip on how to use Twitter to research your website hosting company comes in handy. Good luck in finding quality web hosting for your site.
