As hosting companies offer financial incentives for getting customers to sign up with them, the number of web hosting "review" sites that have sprung up across the Internet is incredible.

Unfortunately, a lot of these may not always be completely objective.

For instance, some sites may give glowing reviews to hosting companies based solely on how much financial incentive they give out for signing up new accounts. Also, there have been reports of hosts giving incentive to current customers to go out on the web and give good reviews. This sometimes even includes review sites that don't seem to be biased, such as those that allow user reviews.

Hosting companies can send out armies of shills to dilute negative press.

So how can you tell if a review is legit or not?

Try searching Google for the name of the host plus the word "forum." Find small comments in discussion forums that don't link to the host itself. These will tend to be more likely to be trustworthy comments about the host rather than shilled "reviews."

This is exactly what we do for you on Ask Mr Hosting; we try to keep out the shill factor by searching the web ourselves for what appear to be legitimate user comments. Generally, if the comment is on a site that doesn't have anything to do specifically with web hosting, and there are no links provided to the host, and the comment is short in nature as opposed to a suspicious long review, we post it here.

Check out our list of web hosting companies, peruse the comments, but remember: take them with a grain of salt. Just because several users had problems with a host doesn't mean that host is necessarily bad. And just because we didn't find any negative comments doesn't mean there aren't any.