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Dotster Review
Date Added: 4/8/2010     Reviewer: windychris
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Website URL: http://www.dotster.com
Company Name: Dotster, Inc.
Alexa Traffic Rank: 17,696
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Dotster Description

Dotster is a web hosting and domain registration company that is based in Vancouver, Washington. The company has over 10 years in the industry and they are serving more than 1 million customers worldwide. The company has strongly pushed their web hosting service over the years and it is slowly gaining some ground in their portfolio of service they offer.
Dotster Detailed Overview

Whether you need to register your domain name, get an email account, web hosting, or get a dedicated server, Dotster can provide that for you. The company is mainly a domain registrar but has added many different services. I want to focus on the company for domain names and for web hosting in this review.

First of all, you can get various domain names from Dotster from .mobi, .tel, .tv, .me, and .us. The price for registration is higher than other registrars. Even .me domains go for $9.95 a year for the first year. I had to wonder what the point of using Dotster when I could go to another reliable registrar and save a few bucks. Transferring your domain in and out of Dotster is also more difficult to do than with other registrars.

The web hosting they are offering is based on Linux. They offer remote database access, SSL support, PHP5, Perl, Python, and many free applications with their service. The basic plan ($5.75) gets you 10GB of disk space, 300GB of bandwidth, 1 domain, 5 FTP logins, and 10 MySQL Databases. You can get an upgrade to 100GB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 50 domains, 25 FTP logins, and 25 MySQL databases for $8.75 a month. The total unlimited plan costs $15.99 a month.

What I like about their plans is that it includes unlimited sub domains, email accounts, FTP accounts, and MySQL databases. The plans come with 50000 MB in storage space, 500 GB in bandwidth, and you can host up to 20 domains with the plan. This is not as good as other hosts that provide unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domains but their service is very fast.

What I didn’t like is that they limit FTP logins, use their own custom control panel, and put limits on the number of domains you can host with the basic plans. While their plans are cheaper if you sign a longer contract, the normal prices are much more expensive than the leading hosting companies.

The uptime figures are not high according to third party tests. Many people have reported their site going down for hours at a time. It is one thing if that happens on occasion but there are multiple reports for this problem. If you need a reliable hosting provider, I do not recommend Dotster. Their support also has a long history of being bad. If you browse through man review sites, you’ll notice multiple reports of incompetent staff and slow response time.

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Dotster Reputation

In conclusion, Dotster is a service that you will want to avoid. Their uptime figures are low, their support is bad, and the price you pay is much higher than other services. Even as a domain registrar, it is much better and easier to use other registrars. I highly recommend that you look elsewhere if you want to get web hosting and registrar a domain name.

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Not happy at all

It took Dotster more than 3 weeks to admit that they closed my account and erased my files without notifying me.

Facts are the following:

1. According to their representative, at April 30,2012 Dotster bought my former hosting company.

2. At May 4, I discovered that access to my former homepage is blocked and I can't login.

3. I was not able to contact Dotster customer service. Their direct E-mail address was not accessible.

4. Dotster people failed to respond my four requests about withdrawing files.

5. Dotster made a special login webpage for former fortunecity customers that in my knowledge never worked.

I believe that Dotster.com is not reliable and Dotster people do not follow good business practices. In my opinion, they should inform customers of their policy changes in advance (1); They should provide customers an option to opt-out and reasonable time for closing their accounts (2); They should respond immediately the requests and provide a public E-mail for complains (3); They should not erase users' files and other information from their servers unless the resolution of all potential problems.

Thus, my conclusion is obvious. It is based on facts and my personal experience with Dotster. I believe Dotster people are inexperienced and unorganized. I would not purchase from Dotster because there do not provide any warranty of anything, they do not see potential problems and they can't handle existing problems professionally.
 
 


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avatar   by alex7103 on June 3, 2012 at 7:36 AM CST
 
 
 
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