Tophosts.com is a Canadian based web hosting resource that describes itself as "the premier host directory on the Web." Companies listed at Tophosts.com are categorized by the type of hosting they offer. The category links are located in the middle of the home page and in the left sidebar.
I couldn't find any place at Tophosts.com that provided information on how many companies were listed in the directory, or what the fees were for a company that wanted to be listed. However, when I hovered my mouse pointer over the listings for several of the companies listed at Tophosts.com, the status bar at the bottom of my browser displayed long link urls that included text such as "RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads." In addition, there were not many companies listed under each category listing. These two details led me to believe that Tophosts.com is an affiliate of most of the companies listed in their directory.
Tophosts.com has a clean, modular design. The colors used for the site are white for the background, and black, white, gray, and red for the text and borders. The fonts used are easy to read. There are banner ads on the site, but they blend in well with the content. There is a search box conveniently located at the top right corner of the site's pages. Below that is the main part of the site’s header. Just below that, at the bottom of the header, are menu links that point to the main areas of the site. Below the header, in the left sidebar, are links to news, the forums, photo galleries, and other parts of the site. The center of the home page contains links to the various categories of web hosting companies listed at Tophosts.com.
There are several aspects of Tophosts.com that I found to be very appealing. There is a news blog, accessible through a link at the top of every page, that is updated with web hosting articles on a regular basis. There is a web hosting discussion forum, also accessible through a link a the top of every page, that has over 77,000 posts on web hosting and marketing topics, and that had 124 active users when I was looking at it.
Tophosts.com has a special group of awards, which they call the "Top 25 Web Hosts," that are selected every month. Each company that is named to the monthly "Top 25 Web Hosts" list receives a profile page that provides more details about the company. The profile page includes testimonials, a company overview, and in some cases an interview with the CEO. From what I could tell, the awards are genuine, and not given out based on the award winners having an affiliate program.
There were two parts of Tophosts.com that I didn't like. One was the way that the category names on the home page were linked to pages containing affiliate links, not unbiased directory listings. The other part that I didn't like was that the page titled "Hosting Reviews" contained only one review. Any site that calls itself "the premier host directory on the Web" should have more than one review.
In summary, even though I think that Tophosts.com could use some more unbiased directory listings and more web host reviews, the site is well designed and provides useful resources for people seeking a web host.
