Is there any way to vet providers?

[sunjam]

Are there any methods in place to vet providers? I see this is a community list. However, providers are definitely not equal in terms of not only apps and software provided, but mostly in terms oftheir actual support and dependability.

Thanks for considering.

[jospoortvliet]

Hi,
Yes, this is a bit of a concern. So in our Simple Signup program we try and have vetted providers, but in this list it is hard - for this reason I point to https://help.nextcloud.com/c/hosting where people can provide feedback.

Would it be good to create a topic for each provider and add a rating? Yes, yes. But we don't get much feedback so the reputation of providers would be based on just a few votes.

Alternatively, we could do a survey once a year, and put the results in this repo - directing people to the winners. The providers would be allowed to push their users to vote, which would likely result in a fair bit of voters and thus create (more) valid results.

But that's a lot of work to execute and I don't really have somebody who I could dedicate this work to. Yes it is nice, but there is a lot of nice stuff we would love to do...

If you say, hey, I want to organize that - say so. That might work ;-)

[sunjam]

Good points. The problem we are finding in the forum is that people post to hosting category in order to complain. If it works well, they don't post. The points posted might be totally valid, but it is problematic when combined with personal attacks.

Ideally, votes could be aggregated to the app store or perhaps in the forum after further finessing. A survey could definitely make sense. If you have suggestions for better organizing this, I and the other forum admins/mods would be open to it. Cheers!