If you distrust official reviews, then you can always go to some major hosting or webmaster forum and simply see what actual buyers have to say about certain hosting. Of course, it might be possible to bribe a few of them to be biased, but I don't think most of the people there are bribed. Oh, by the way, you can also go on forums to check out the outages of major hosting companies. If you see a lot of problems, then it could be a warning.