Dotster
- From the company
Why Dotster?
Headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, Dotster has established itself among the world's largest domain name registrars with more than 3 million domain holdings under management and servicing hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.
At Dotster, our mission is to provide a range of innovative, reliable and easy-to-use Internet solutions to our customers and to support them with unprecedented, personalized support.
Leveraging a strong market position within the domain name registration industry, Dotster has carefully nurtured relationships with its customer base and built a feature-rich line of value-added services around its core domain name product offering. By bundling services and providing one-stop shopping, Dotster has successfully grown and enjoyed increased breadth and loyalty of its customer base. From the company
Dotster
Expert Review- From the Editors
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P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
Sales: 1-360-449-5800
Dotster was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Vancouver, WA. Powered by wind energy, Dotster offers Windows and Linux shared web hosting, virtual private servers, email hosting, business plans, web design and is an iCANN accredited registrar.
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Review
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Pricing
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Dotster’s smallest Linux-based shared hosting plan includes 10 gigabytes of space and 300 gigabytes of bandwidth for $3.75/month (when paying yearly). Dotster’s plans are not only affordable, but downright cheap. My only beef here is that Dotster boasts “no long-term commitments necessary,” but forces clients to sign up and pay for at least one year of service ahead of time.
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Uptime
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My premium uptime monitor indicated that Dotster maintained a 99.96% uptime record over one year.
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Sales
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Sales questions are taken by phone at Dotster. I called on seven different occasions over the period of one week and each time Dotster’s automated system hung up on me before connecting to an actual human representative. There’s no email address listed on Dotster’s site and they only seem to allow support to registered customers. As such, I was forced to keep calling and calling. Finally, on week two, I hit gold and connected with a Dotster sales team member. The call went smoothly and I was left overall impressed, but the hassle of getting through to Dotster overshadowed the experience.
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Support
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Dotster gives customer support mainly by trouble ticket system. I found it easy to file a ticket, but not so easy to get help. I had difficulty with Dotster’s email server continually bouncing emails—even to my own address—and though I received several notices that the problem would be dealt with, it never really was. When I asked to move to a different server, I was told by support that their system did not support this. Disappointing!
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Setup
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Account sign up is handled online and it’s a smooth process that involves filling out an order form. Once that’s done, Dotster sends an invoice and account details to the email address you used during registration.
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Reliability
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The hosting server where my domain spent one year had frequent mail server issues, but suffered no hardware failure of any kind.
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Billing
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Dotster accepts all major credit cards, but does not take PayPal. I had no issues to speak of with the billing department during my stay and no trouble in cancelling my account.
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Guarantee
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30 day money back guarantee.
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99.9% uptime guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for Dotster are online. Highlights include:
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Website space may not be used to back up, archive or store files.
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MySQL databases may not exceed 5 gigabytes in size.
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Websites hosting illegal files or copyrighted material will be suspended.
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Spamming prohibited.
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Advantages
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Good uptime.
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Cheap.
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Easy-to-use control panels (cPanel and Plesk).
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Both Windows and Linux shared hosting available.
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Disadvantages
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Poor customer service and support.
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Cannot pay on a month-to-month basis.
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