WH-D.com Officially Launched! Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WH-D.com Introduces First Ever Social Web Hosting Directory, Enters Web 2.0 Era
AMMAN, Jordan (May 14, 2007) – WH-D.com (http://www.wh-d.com) today unveiled the first-ever social web hosting directory, featuring dynamic host listings that change positioning based upon user votes. The concept diverges significantly from traditional hosting directories, which often rely on static, pay-per-click advertisements to power the site.
WH-D.com allows site visitors to search for web hosting providers serving a multitude of categories, including managed, budget, Linux, Windows, reseller, and VPS hosting. Within each category, visitors are presented with a list of posts for various hosts, and visitors can then vote for posts that they find reliable or helpful. Ultimately, the positioning of each post in the category changes as new votes are submitted, with popular posts quickly reaching the top of the page.
“It’s about empowering our users,†said Sohaib Thiab, CEO and co-founder of WH-D.com. “There is a universal shift in logic in the way information should be organized online. As the ideas of Web 2.0 continue to proliferate and become reality, it grows apparent that site patrons—and not site administrators or a marketing team—should determine how content is organized. Without patrons, even the best designed site is utterly useless.â€
In addition to categories for web hosts, WH-D also offers listings of current coupons and hosting related news and how-to articles. In keeping with the user-driven theme of the site, these categories are also sorted by votes, and not paid positioning.
The site has been in development for about 2 months, and site administrators hope to roll-out new features and tools as they become available.
For more information about WH-D.com, please visit http://www.wh-d.com.
About WH-D.com
Founded in 2007, WH-D.com is a next-generation hosting directory and news portal built around the principles of Web 2.0 design and development. Featuring post positioning driven by community votes and not paid placement, the site encourages visitors to take an active role in shaping search results.
Official press release can be found on w3reports here.
May 14th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
Interesting, but the ‘Digg’ idea is pretty useless for web hosting plans. How can people vote in a meaningful way on offers / plans that ultimately are all pretty much the same and haven’t yet actually experienced?, plus all that will happen if this ever was used is hosts themselves would ‘digg’, ‘bury’ so the actual ranking would be worthless.
Nice idea, but has no chance of success
May 15th, 2007 at 12:12 am
Very, very exciting stuff. I’m really looking forward to this.
May 15th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Thanks Bryan
John, thanks for your comment, I am not sure why the digg idea is useless for hosting plans, hosting plans are not all the same, prices and specs could be the same, but clearly customer support and quality of service isn’t, clients of current hosts can vote for their hosts, if I was happy with a host who provided me with an excellent service, I’ll go out of my way to bring them clients and spread the good word, same goes for those who have a bad experience with a certain host, they can warn others about the host, just look at WHT and the amount of posts about good/bad hosts there is over there.
Ultimately we will have to work around issues such as spamming of votes the same way digg and other similar sites do.
May 15th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Sohaib,
Excellent job. I’m envious you manage to launch new websites this quickly. Well done.
I like the idea. It can definitely work.
Nice short domain name. Did you spend much on it?
Also, I’m surprised you have pagerank 5 so soon after launch. Could you kindly share some of your strategies on this?
Thanks
May 15th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Thanks Xin, the domain was available, I registered it a while back when I thought of starting a hosting directory, so i paid the normal $7 for it, as for the PR, me and my partner in this project started link building for the domain before the launch, thats how it get a PR5 so quickly.