Tao is there a site with all this data publicly or to the hosts accessible or do you keep it to yourself and 'share' what you think is relevant?
I'm getting confused as to what's happening with this collection of information that is solely under your auspicious momentum (you seem to like those types of phrases so I thought I'd throw one in for you).
I doubt I'm the only one that thinks your not a Google algorithm level review and would love to know what your doing with the 'numbers' - not a host but I used to be and call it instinct but I wouldn't be happy about the situation your placing hosts in without a full disclosure of data, couple of text lines doesn't cut it on a web page report.
You said in fact it loves it, so where the hell is it!
Not having a go mate but seriously get some openness involved
Some of the hosts might still be "alive", but under a different business name.
You know, even on this forum - several people offered hosting service, then after a while they shut it down, just to start another.
Yes but that would be documented
I could see a lot of this being automated by script. Use a slow-running spider to browse the ads here and pick up the description, poster, and company name that way it is using clean public-visible data as it's source. If people have a problem with that other than the spider running too fast and stressing it's host or the forum, then they really should consider filing a lawsuit against Google for indexing content and thousands of blogs out there who are filled with data harvested from the forum posts here.
Then try the link, and if it yields a page with keywords that are similar within a set percentage in order to filter out name changers and domain parking, mark the host up. If not, mark it dead.
The dead hosts should then be compiled into a list of their own for human investigation to find out what their fate ultimately was and if they perhaps rebranded without making it obvious.
Doing it that way would yield a framework very friendly towards later on making statistics of host longevity, reliability, and price versus stability. I could probably put something of that nature up in PHP in an afternoon or so with a working search feature- key in the host name you want to look up, and it'll show you everything that is known about them. Kind of like a wiki of hosts past and present.
It wouldn't be foolproof though- a dead host that domain parked in a way that yields the right keyword combination would still be tagged up, while a live host with no keywords or a redirected host that didn't carry over any details would be tagged down.
I am working on getting the data and once i do off to the races.
Could be easier, just static pages that are updated to host status in tabular format, simple scrolly down list.
Your updating things manually anyway, so why not have one place where you collate the info into one list, so at least everyone knows what the hell's going on
If you want I could do a real simple to edit set of pages for you, no programming no spidering techniques, although if you can get html responding/not responding data that would be good as an indicator for you to visit and see if the hosts still there.
I can see good things on long term monitor/report but I can't see that anyone gets any benefit if it's not visible, and the hosts are kind of jumping through hoops to try and be in the top list.
As for a comment that it only takes a minute to update with a post while we go into meltdown, if I was a client of theirs I'd tell them to stuff the posting and get my site working again minute or not (oops there goes another sale/client scenario (as in that minute a really good one looked and you weren't there, so they went elsewhere)
Hope you appreciate it's all meant as constructive crit
If you can get me the details as to how your getting the info now I should be able to work it in, again depends on how it's being done, and conversions for downloadable formats whether to a human being with notepad or a spreadsheet or most other things really should be easy enough, even to 'get' from a server for automated updates to something or other.
Now you've got me thinking you git - yes it does hurt, a lot!!!
really right now i am looking to scrape the data from teh forum and have tried a few vb forum scrapers but nothing has worked yet.