competition

Social media marketing can be very effective if done the right way, but if it backfires, the fallout can be pretty undesirable. Such was the case for this Digg story, which compared multiple web hosting companies and watched as these hosts handled the traffic spikes that resulted from the Digg effect.

Note how I bolded a specific term: web hosting. Digg is the social media network of tech geeks, and the Digg statistics should not be too surprising: 39% of Diggers publish their own blog. That means that 39% of Digg’s 1million+ members have considered web hosting, and the winner of the most reliable web host was a company that … apparently was pulled out of thin air.

A few weeks later, a surprising blog post was published that outed the marketing firm and hosting company that sponsored the particular study. It turned out, with investigation, that the “experiment” conducted was not apparently legitimate. One of the non-convinced individuals who found the Digg story took the liberty to look further into this company, Burton Hosting, and the study. Even I could have looked further. In my past positions as a web hosting administrator, I’ve heard of no-name hosting firms, in addition to the obvious well known hosts such as Rackspace, midPhase, MediaTemple, 1&1, HostPC, KnownHost, LiquidWeb, BlueHost, DreamHost… but where and who the hell is Burton Hosting, and what the heck made it perform better than highly reputable hosts that Burton was compared to in the study?