Have you looked for hosting recommendations recently? It's a huge line of affiliate sites pretending to be neutral while giving good reviews to whoever pays them the most.

And then there's EIG, which basically buys out everything in sight, pretends they're still independent and cuts costs at every opportunity.

Not to mention the people starting up hosting companies in the summer holidays, only to run them into the ground or shut down in a few months.

There's a difference between making money and trying to trick people with shoddy products and services.

Don't see this as tricking, it's marketing. EIG offers hosting for next to nothing, and you get what you pay for. If you customer wants to pay for value hosting they can find it by paying more. The other players you are talking about, I don't know how they get customers... it's not easy to get hosting customers, period.

Well, they don't like telling anyone they bought out their provider, nor that it's the cause of a previously good service going downhill. The company buys out hosts offering a decent service at (sometimes) higher prices, then turns them into budget providers with low reliability while trying to keep the news on the low.

As for how the other guys get customers... Deals usually. Sometimes literally on web hosting forums, where they talk advantage of the offers section til they inevitably get banned.

Things may have improved recently in the UK, but a couple of years ago it wasn't unheard of for hosting companies to charge significant release fees for domain transfers, and to delay transfers for weeks or months - sometimes for so long the national registrar had to get involved.

Another popular scam was to lock access to an account when a charging period expired so the owner couldn't access any domain transfer tools, and only allow access and transfers on payment of another full year of hosting.

It's a shady business. IMO there's no real reason why it should be.