If you are in the market for web hosting, there are many ways you can use to determine who may be the best web hosting company for your site or business. You may have even used some of these before.

One way is to simply perform a Google search for “Web hosting”, which will return you a slew of results, usually from the hosting companies themselves. You can also search for terms that are more important to you, such as “web hosting reviews”, “best hosting support”, or possibly “web hosting deals”. These will give you a lot of things to look at.

While you may well find testimonials on these pages from supposedly “satisfied” customers, the reality of the anonymous web is that these may or may not be real.

One newer way people are getting web hosting recommendations is by using Twitter. Social media is nothing if not useful in this respect. You can bet that if someone has had a problem with their web host, they’ve tweeted about it. Conversely, if they’ve encountered a great hosting company with stellar customer service, they will have tweeted about that as well!

Do a search of tweets for the company’s Twitter account. You’ll find that almost every major web hosting company now has one. What you’ll find on these “house” accounts will not likely raise any red flags, but will give you a general feel for how their customers feel about them, and vice versa. Reading through a few pages of these tweets can be enlightening. Are these people you want to be in business with?

Another, far more illuminating, view is found by searching Twitter itself for the hosting company’s name. This will return ALL tweets about them, not just the positive ones or tweets written by employees of the company. You may find a lot of negative here. Certain aspects of a web host’s service may become glaringly obvious. Weak spots may surface. Shoddy service will be revealed.

Take all of this with a grain of salt. Not all customers, especially those who take the time to write a lengthy diatribe against the hosting company are blameless here as well. There may have been more to the story than they are letting on or revealing. Still, if there are a lot of tweets that are crying foul, you may want to either look a bit deeper or elsewhere.

Also, remember that these Tweets may have occurred very recently. If for instance you run across some that bemoan the lack of support contact, and it’s on Sunday night around midnight, chances are that the situation may be very different in the light of day, when the support teams go to work. There are not a huge number or 24/7 live phone support web hosts.

Using Twitter (or your other social media platforms) to get real-time recommendations from users like yourself is not a bad idea. Just make sure you are filtering out the hysteria from the genuine concerns, and you’ll have an added layer of web hosting recommendations to choose from!