Whether you are a long term managed hosting client or a first time prospective web hosting customer, the best thing you can do before investing in any IT solution is research. While part of your research will be talking to specific companies via online chat channels and reading their marketing/sales literature both online and off, another major aspect of deciding on a managed hosting provider is talking to the clients who have/currently use solutions you are interested in.
To do this, there is no better avenue than managed hosting forums. More specifically, there are no better managed hosting forums than Web Hosting Talk and SitePoint.
Web Hosting Talk
Let’s state the obvious: no article about the best managed hosting forums would be complete without mentioning the king of the group. Web Hosting Talk, billing itself as “the largest, most influential web and cloud hosting community on the Internet” holds the distinction as being the largest and most used web hosting forum in operation. Here is what makes Web Hosting Talk a killer managed hosting forum.
Forum Coverage of the Entire Web Hosting Industry
The obvious of the site is, well, obvious. Web Hosting Talk, like many web hosting and managed hosting forums, is broken down into the following sections:
– Industry Announcements
– Web Hosting
– Dedicated Server
– Colocation and Data Centers
– Cloud Hosting
– Specialty Hosting and Markets
– VPS Hosting
– Reseller Hosting
– Managed Hosting and Services
– Hosting Security and Technology
– Programming Discussion
– Hosting Software and Controls Panels
– Running a Web Hosting Business
– Ecommerce Hosting and Discussion
– Domain Names
– Web Design and Content
– SEO /SEM Discussions
– Web Hosting Talk tutorials
A smaller section of forums, titled “Other Forums” is broken down into the following forum section heads:
– Web Hosting Lounge
– WHT Announcements, Feedback and Questions
– Web Hosting Chat Club
– Computers and Peripherals
– Web Hosting Meetups and Networking
– HostingCon
– WHT Community Groups
Lastly, Web Hosting Talk smartly breaks advertising forums into a further section. That section includes:
– Web Hosting Offers
– Domain Name Advertising
– Employment Offers and requests
– Design Job Offers and Requests
– Software and Scripts Offers and Requests
– Marketing and SEO Services Offers and Requests
– Free Hosting Offers and Requests
– Paid Hosting Requests
– Community Reviews
As you can tell, Web Hosting Talk has many forums. Broken down even further, each forum contains single to various sub-forums. For example, the Managed Hosting and Services Forum breaks down into the sub-forum of Managed Service Provider Offers.
Threads on Everything and Anything Managed Hosting
Click into the Managed Hosting and Services forum. As of the writing of this article – January 20, 2015 – there are 88 pages of open threads with 30 threads on each page. Quick math means there are currently 2,640 open threads discussing everything and anything managed hosting.
A quick look at the first page shows threads speaking to the following topics:
– “BQBackup vs. Backupsy”
– “Website Panel and Top Level Browsing by Users”
– “Quadix – Signup and Refund Experience”
– “Need Reliable cPanel Server Management Company”
– “High Quality Server Infrastructure Management”
– “Server Management Plus vs. Touch Support vs. Server Surgeon”
– “Any External Backup Server Hosting Running R1Soft / Idera?”
This could be the best aspect of Web Hosting Talk Managed Hosting forums: the variety of topics held within. Yet more to the point, what makes Web Hosting Talk the best managed hosting forum in the world, are the conversations held within each thread.
Direct Community and Company Interactions
Due to the size of the website, Web Hosting Talk attracts the attention of expect consumers and managed hosting providers alike. This means in any given thread, a question posed will illicit frank answers from fellow service users alongside company representatives/vying company representatives trying to find a solution to the posed problem or highlight how their service might be a better fit for your needs.
Take for example the thread of: “Email Protocols – Gmail Push, IMAP and MS Exchange”.
The first post in the thread is from the poster. The following four posts are written by community members offering free sage advice to the original poster on the best email service related to managed hosting. An example of an informed community post:
“IMAP and POP are both common, well supported protocols. The “average joe” putting a website online doesn’t need more than basic inbox functionality and IMAP does a pretty good job of keeping your inbox in sync across devices. The calendar and contact features just aren’t necessary for many people. As you move into the SME area, more businesses will have full in-house solutions or hosted Exchange/Google Apps/etc. separately to their website hosting.”
As you can tell, the information provided – for free – is essential to answering the original posed query. The genius of Web Hosting Talk is the expert level advice users can receive from fellow managed hosting consumers and businesses.
Mods, Mods, Mods
Another key aspect of life within Web Hosting Talk are the mods. Mods, or moderators, are the governing individuals within each forum who decide which posts can stay and which posts must go. An easy example of mod community interaction is the moving of content from a non-advertising forum to an advertising forum (companies selling solutions) or a mod deleting a user for spamming the forums with spurious links or non-related content. For the most part, Web Hosting Talk mods keep the forums honest.
The one downside of Web Hosting Talk forum mods is the general feeling within the community that most mods, in some way or another, have financial ties to various web hosting and managed hosting companies in the industry. This means when a mod deletes a post, it isn’t unlikely for that deleted poster to vent his/her rage on a social media platform relating the mod to financial incentive. While none of this is confirmed, it is a real sentiment within the forums.
Connecting the Dots
We’ve mentioned breadth of forum topics within Web Hosting Talk. What needs to be mentioned is the best part of this breadth of forum topics is the ease which consumers can link managed hosting needs to cloud hosting needs and cloud hosting needs to VPS server needs. The single best aspect of the overall community – the reason Web Hosting Talk is the king of hosting forums – is the site’s ability to cross channel your interest in managed web hosting solutions with applicable dedicated server or reseller hosting solutions. Web Hosting Talk enables you to research managed hosting while also learning about other critical parts of the industry you may never have thought applicable to your business.
This is what makes it an incredibly powerful consumer tool.
Bonus Material: Due to its size, Web Hosting Talk attracts steep discounts from all sorts of web hosting providers. If you are looking for the best managed hosting sales or managed hosting discounts, the advertising section of Web Hosting Talk is the place to be.
SitePoint
URL: www.sitepoint.com
In the past few years, the SitePoint community has morphed as the SitePoint website has evolved from a strictly forum platform into a knowledgebase of hosting and programming data. Traditionally, SitePoint was the Australian version of Web Hosting Talk. While it was never as large or dominant as Web Hosting Talk, SitePoint served as a secondary managed hosting and web hosting forum designed to provide the same breadth of categories and community interactions through open threads.
Yet with small and subtle shifts mounting over time, at the end of 2014, SitePoint continued its transition into a data knowledgebase of web hosting/managed hosting and programming. More a data share than a true forum, SitePoint, unlike Web Hosting Talk, now offers a wide variety of blog/technical how-to content alongside a ecommerce platform selling learning materials, an online learning platform filled with a wide variety of course topics and traditional forums for expert level consumer and business interactions.
Managed Hosting Forums, Data, Knowledge and Beyond
While SitePoint no longer caters to the web hosting/managed hosting market exclusively, its growth into a knowledgebase which makes it a leading contender for taking the crown from Web Hosting Talk.
As mentioned the genius of Web Hosting Talk is the breadth of community interaction within across all topics. Likewise, the genius of the new SitePoint is the amount of raw data, knowledge and how-to information managed hosting clients can now gleam from the site. Whether it is blogging content, course, technical articles on deploying/managing hosting hardware or chatting with other consumers about the best managed hosting companies for growing enterprises, SitePoint, more than any other “forum” platform, provides consumers with a true full life-cycle knowledgebase designed to empower consumers and the businesses they operate.
The Future of SitePoint
Possibly the most interesting facet of SitePoint is the continued evolution of the web hosting, managed hosting, programming forum knowledgebase. Whereas Web Hosting Talk and other web hosting forums have stayed tied into the traditional forum platform, SitePoint is at the leading edge of where most forums could eventually evolve.
The future of SitePoint will be something to watch. With the change in direction, as more and more excellent content is added to the knowledgebase, the growth of SitePoint might enable it to eclipse Web Hosting Talk as the number one forum for not only web hosting topics but various programming topics.
Bonus Material: Check out the SitePoint Newsletters section. Signing up for SitePoint Newsletters will “keep you up to date with the very best and latest tutorials, trips, tricks, resources and offers.”