

Show HN: Review Signal - Real web hosting reviews based on social media comments - ohashi
http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting

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laserDinosaur
It seems like a good idea, but I suspect hosting companies could either setup
fake twitter accounts or get their employees to spam positive reviews. Where
as normally they have the dirty practice of logging into a review site and
generating plant reviews (something that shows intent), this way they can just
claim "Hey, we were just posting positive reviews to all 10,0000 of our own
twitter accounts, we had no idea they were being used on Review Signal!".

They say "All messages from people financially or otherwise connected to the
company will not be counted in the reviews.", but how do they really know?

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ohashi
Honestly, like SEO, it will be a game of cat and mouse. It's pretty easy to
see big changes if a company gets a lot of tweets. Then it becomes an
investigative matter and figuring out how to find real vs fake. It's not
perfect, it never will be. But I think it's a step in the right direction (I
could be biased ;) )

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dutchbrit
This fails for me.

I selected Developer, budget between 101-250, for "something else", while
being comfortable managing it myself.

That something else is all my projects/websites essentially, which all differ
a lot.

I doubt running that on Shared Hosting is a good idea?!

Besides that, awesome job - I like the idea, most review sites are filled with
fake reviews just to make the website owner make the most via the programs
that pay most..

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ohashi
You're absolutely right. Honestly, the hosting recommendation tool is designed
more for people that don't know anything about hosting right now. Making good
suggestions for developers is hard. It's one of the things that definitely
needs improvement.

That said, given what you put in, what sort of recommendation would you
expect/want? I have some ideas but I would rather hear yours first before
injecting my own opinion.

~~~
dutchbrit
Well, selecting other - maybe a longer dropdown - entering how many sites (and
what kind), bandwidth usage, visitors - rough figures obviously.

Some awesome features would be entering X amount of ip's (if you want unique
or multiple), and maybe also add something regarding main demographic (should
I go for a US provider, Asian, or European).

Should I go for a VPS? Or a Dedicated server? I know, it's tricky to calculate
all of this - but it'd be awesome!

Last but not least, I'd only show these options if someone were to select a
checkbox for advanced options.

~~~
ohashi
Thank you for the ideas. I have added them to the feature list. I will see
what we can come up with based on your suggestions. The difference between
vps/dedicated/cloud is really hard to recommend these days. It's also getting
all mixed up, making recommendations even harder. Any ideas on that?

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charliepark
This seems handy. I already knew a lot of the companies within the bounds of
the configuration specs I listed, but found a few new ones.

I'd love to see digitalocean.com on there (maybe I missed them?). No
affiliation ... just saw someone link to them recently and would be curious
how they stack up with the others.

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trotsky
Seems like the top listing for most categories is mostly there because they
seem to do informal support via twitter leading to people responding happily.
I'm not knocking them, I've never heard of them and they certainly could be
great, but I'm not primarily looking for a hoster that uses twitter as a
ticket system.

~~~
ohashi
That's a fair criticism and concern. From what I observed most companies are
interacting on Twitter and some do it better than others. Do you have any
ideas on how to improve the system? I know my way isn't perfect and I am
always looking for ways to make it more accurate and representative.

~~~
trotsky
I'd be curious to see what sentiment analysis of web hosting talk (or
similar?) yielded.

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mojorising
finally a site with enough data to make a credible recommendation on hosting
companies, any chance you'll cover overseas markets at some point?

~~~
ohashi
Right now it's very US centric. As far as covering other countries, possibly
on other english speaking countries like the UK. I am not sure I am ready to
expand into analyzing other languages, so that would be a major issue for
expanding to many markets abroad.

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vijayr
how does it classify tweets into negative/positive?

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vijayr
will this last long? with twitter's new "rules"?

~~~
ohashi
The change (as far as my understanding goes) is it requires authenticated
requests. I don't think it should be an issue, it just means doing everything
with Oauth.

