Burton Hosting Busted for Devious Marketing Project?

This blog post by David A. Utter in WebProNews points to a post published by blogger Devindra Hardawar, that appears to have uncovered the questionable purpose behind a site that was a big hit in recent weeks with social bookmarking sites.

The site, known as “The Web 2.0 Effect” purported to be an experiment testing how a selection of Web hosting providers fared at weathering the storm of traffic that can come from an appearance on something like Digg.

As planned, the site apparently made a splash on those very sites in the last few weeks, and appeared to be a somewhat useful tool for evaluating low-cost hosting.

After a bit of investigation, Hardawar posted that something fishy appeared to be up at the site. The site, it seems is affiliated with the hosting provider finished the “test” with the best score. A company called Burton Hosting.

There is a long list of red flags on the site, not the least of which is the fact that the person behind the experiment (who, incidentally, writes in the first person but does not identify himself) inexplicably chose to include the almost-unheard-of Burton Hosting while leaving out certain other obvious low-cost considerations, such as Go Daddy.

What’s more, it would have been a fairly unreliable – arguably almost useless – experiment even if it was legit. Hardawar says:

“This wasn’t a very realistic experiment: The test was simply a paragraph of “Lorem ipsum” text on a colored background. If they really wanted to test real-world hosting capabilities they should have included post-1995 web features such as images, dynamic content through a database connection, and scripting of some sort.”

I’m not going to run through the whole list of bogus details, which are listed quite nicely in Hardawar’s post. I’d suggest reading the whole thing.

There is a bit of a history now of Web hosts trying unusual Web-based marketing projects. There’s the troubling (Globat’s maybe-unknowing work with amateur pornographer Dustin Diamond). And there’s the simply dull (the Web “games” produced by companies like Affinity, WestHost and Hostway).

But for all their faults, none of these efforts crossed the not-so-imaginary line that I have to imagine exists somewhere in the grey area of questionable marketing efforts. If The Web 2.0 Effect is indeed affiliated with, or produced by, Burton hosting, then it incorporates at the very least a bit of misdirection by omission. And using misdirection to sell at all costs is a spammer’s tactic.

Is Web hosting still far enough under the radar that nobody’s watching to hold this sort of effort accountable? I’m sure the old “Pepsi Challenge” taste-test TV ad routine was held to a certain standard of accountability in terms of truth - if not by the FCC then probably by Coke.

Maybe it’s up to the Web hosting community to do something about this kind of dubious tactic.