How To Use The “Suckage Ratio”
December 22nd, 2008 | by Conrad Walton |The “suckage ratio” can tell you which company or product to use, including web hosts.
You can do Google searches on exact phrases by putting quotes around the words. If you want to know what people are saying about a specific company or product or web host, do a search for these phrases: “product” and “product sucks”
When you compare the suckage ratio of one product to another, you'll get an idea of what the general population thinks of the products.
Divide the number of “product sucks” search results by the number of “product” results. That is your “suckage ratio”. The idea is to compare the number of times the product is talked about with the number of times that it is talked about negatively.
The number itself doesn’t tell you anything important, but when you compare the suckage ratio of one product to another, or of one company with another, you’ll get an idea of what the general population thinks of the products or companies. I wouldn’t this as the only point to base a decision on, but it’s a good piece of information to have when making choices.
As you can see from the chart below, Powweb, the web host that I recommend, I use and I am very happy with, is very close to the best. I don’t have any experience with BlueHost, but maybe I will have to check into them.
| Web Host | Total | Sucks | Suckage Ratio |
| Hostgator | 2,980,000 | 1,900 | 6.38% |
| HostMonster | 2,060,000 | 926 | 4.50% |
| iPower | 1,470,000 | 1,650 | 1.12% |
| Pow Web | 779,000 | 815 | 1.05% |
| BlueHost | 2,120,000 | 2,180 | 1.03% |
I’m glad to see that you utilize a ratio (most posts like these just use the flat out number of results), but am disappointed to see that HostGator had the highest “suckage ratio.”
With that in mind, though, our customer service is still amongst the best in the industry and is continually improving. We also invest a lot of time and resources into reaching out to customers that have any trouble (we have an extremely strong presence on the Twitter and regularly reach out to bloggers). And the CEO of the company is also personally available to customers who ask (this is not a gimmick and actually does happen).
Hopefully our reaching out will help demonstrate our commitment to customer service excellence. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to send me an email.
[...] I’ve been promoting PowWeb, since they are who I’m happy with, but perhaps it’s time to stroll on down to Hostgator and check them out. Quoting from How To Use The “Suckage Ratio” | Web Design and Developement for Small Business [...]