Dot5 Hosting
- From the company
At Dot5Hosting, we provide our customers quality web hosting at an affordable price with a friendly and high-quality level of technical support.
Who We Are
Founded in 2002, Dot5Hosting has built its success around our carefully put-together hosting package that meets the needs of all potential users, ranging from the home user through to the commerce business user.
We provide our customers with quality web hosting at an affordable price—and support them with friendly, high-quality technical support. Our call center provides technical support to our customers 24x7, and we pride ourselves on our quick-call response times, and our knowledgeable and courteous staff. We operate on the theory that if we don't look after our customers, someone else will. From the company
Dot5 Hosting
Expert Review- From the Editors
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70 Blanchard Rd., 3rd floor
Burlington, MA 01803
1-866-811-2548
Dot5 opened their doors for business back in 2002. Owned by the Endurance International Group and using two data centers in Boston, Dot 5 offers Linux shared web hosting plans.
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Review
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Sales
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I wanted to run a few questions by Dot5’s sales team before signing up for an account. The Dot5 sales team works on live chat, email and telephone. I connected with sales by live chat. After a wait time of four minutes, I was able to speak with a representative who was extremely friendly and helpful, but a little slow. Either the salesman was juggling more than one potential client at a time or he didn’t know the answer to a few questions. Simple questions, like what control panel Dot5 uses, took more than five minutes to answer. I had a similar experience by phone a few moments later. The sales team members were super friendly and pleasant to speak with, but weren’t well versed with the makings of the company.
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Setup
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I invested in a shared web hosting plan with Dot5, paying by the year. I had an invoice in my email inbox within a few moments of paying, and a welcome letter with account instructions shortly after that. My account details were accurate and everything I needed to get online was made available to me. Very smooth!
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Billing
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Dot5 takes payment by credit card, debit card or PayPal. I paid for my new account with PayPal and was billed correctly. I also had no trouble cancelling my account the following year.
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Pricing
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Dot5 has one unlimited everything hosting plan that starts at $5.95 a month, if you pay two years in advance, and gets more expensive the shorter the duration of your payment schedule. The price is excellent if you can pay for two years of service ahead of time, but not so awesome if paying quarterly. The quarterly charge comes with a $30 setup fee and doesn’t include the promised free domain name. All in all, Dot5 has a pretty average, though slightly misleading, pricing structure.
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Reliability
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I stayed with Dot5 for exactly one year. There were no hardware issues to speak of during my time with Dot5, but I had a few network problems that amounted to slow loading web pages at various times, most especially on weekends. Static pages seemed to load speedily, but my forum would often take more than thirty seconds to render.
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Support
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Despite their relatively large size, I was always pleasantly surprised to find that I could reach Dot5 support in a matter of moments. Dot5 offers 24/7 support by phone, email and live chat. It takes under five minutes to connect with a support rep by any of those means, which is impressive for a large company. Like the sales department, however, Dot5 support underwhelmed me when it came to their knowledge of their own company. Team members seemed to be unaware of when a hosting server was down and hence, didn’t have a clue when I might expect my domain to be back online.
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Uptime
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I have a premium uptime monitor attached to my domain names and I used that to monitor my stay with Dot5. My website did go down on three different occasions during my year long stay, though each period of downtime lasted less than 30 minutes.
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Guarantee
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99.9% uptime guarantee
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30-day money back guarantee
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Dot5 can be found online. Highlights include:
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Excessive CPU usage not allowed.
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Anti-spam policy actively enforced.
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Copyright violations will result in termination of account.
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Advantages
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Friendly, courteous staff.
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Free domain name when paying one year in advance.
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Reliable hardware.
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24/7 support.
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Easy-to-operate custom control panel.
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Disadvantages
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$30 setup fee if not paying at least one year in advance.
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Sales and support not always as knowledgeable as they should be.
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Slow loading web pages at times, particularly the weekends, leading us to believe that some servers may be overloaded.
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