Dot5 Hosting Review
Dot5Hosting is founded in year 2002. They were well-known with their ‘budget hosting’ as the company focus intensively in offering hosting service in cheap price. They were awarded as "Best Budget Host" by Hosting-Review.com and "Best Web Host" by Top-10-Web-Hosting a few years back.
Dot5Hosting Overall rating
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Dot5Hosting.
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The good things about Dot5Hosting
Cheap Hosting Cost
The best thing abotu Dot5Hosting is CHEAP. I mean, they are dead cheap! At first, Dot5 is offering $4.95/mo for unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth transfer, unlimited email accounts, plus free domain name for the first registration. Then what surprise me is that they are giving out more as the market competition grew steeper – guess what? They are offering the same package at $3.95/mo! In other words, you’ll get the power to host unlimited website in one hosting account, with less than $50 a year. There are quite a number of hosting companies offering unlimited bandwidth/web storage, but none of them are offering at this low price.
Also, I would like to highlight that while Dot5′s hosting plans are cheap, their hosting plan are rich of valuable addon features (besides those mentioned above). Among them: great Web Site Templates, shopping cart,FrontPage & Dreamweaver compatible, useful script library (like Fantastico), free ads on Google and Yahoo!, instant free setup, and the all new, intergrated Google Webmaster Tools at control panel.
vDeck Hosting
While most hosting companies offer cPanel as the control panel for shared hosting, Dot5 offers vDeck as their control panel. Although the control panel is not a popular one, I believe it’s an advantage for Dot5 as it fits the requirement for certain webmasters who are not interested in using cPanel. (Sidenote: StartLogic by the way, is another hosting service that’re using vDeck).
Drawbacks with Dot5Hosting
Dot5Hosting Server Reliability
On top of these, I notice that Dot5Hosting receive lots of credit on their server reliability. From my research, Dot5 provide live monitoring from server reboots to real time reporting. They in fact, employ Dell and IBM servers with Dual Intel Xeon processors and all the bells and whistles – which sum up to be another plus point for the hosting service. *Updates: Recently I see there’re increasing complaints on Dot5 hosting reliability around the Internet. Although I’m not having much problem with the hosting (remember the comic site I mentioned earlier? It’s working fine), some customers actually found their websites went down (or slow response).
Poor customer support
Dot5Hosting sucks in term of customer supports.
By running thru web hosting forums and website, I noticed there’re some complaints on Dot5Hosting customer supports. Their customer support are most probably outsourced to foreign country many find the staffs at customer support department speak poor English. There is, in fact, a few transcript recorded online at Ussbrewton / Dot5 Hosting, and the customer support seems very very poor.
Also, there’s report filed that the hosting company refused to response on money-back claims.
Dot5Hosting Hosting Features
Dot5Hosting offers only one hosting plans and here are the features here.
| Pricing | Details |
| 12 months plan (Mid Plan) | $3.95/mo |
| Hosting Features | Details |
| Disk Space | Unlimited |
| Monthly Bandwidth | Unlimited |
| Free Domain Name | Yes |
| Free Site Builder | Yes |
| CGI-BIN | Yes |
| SSI (Server Side Includes) | Yes |
| Frontpage Extensions | Yes |
| FTP Access | Yes |
| Domain Features | Details |
| Host additional Domains | Unlimited |
| Parked Domains | Unlimited |
| Subdomains | Unlimited |
| Email Features | Details |
| POP and IMAP Email | Unlimited |
| Email Forwarders | Unlimited |
| Email Autoresponder | Unlimited |
| Webmail (Browser Based Email) | Yes |
| CGI/Database Features | Details |
| Perl 5 | Yes |
| PHP 5 | Yes |
| mySQL Databases | Unlimited |
| Ruby/Ruby on Rails | Yes |
| Java script/DHTML | Yes |
| Free Plugin Features | Details |
| Simple Script Support | No |
| Fantastico Script Support (Dot5 provide its inhouse instant-installation software) |
No |
| Message Forum (PHPBB & more) | Yes |
| Guest Books | Yes |
| Image Galleries | Yes |
| eCommerce Features | Details |
| OS Commerce Shopping Cart | No |
| Agora Shopping Cart | Yes |
| ShopSite Shopping Cart | No |
| Private SSL | Yes |
| Multimedia Features | Details |
| Flash & Shockwave Support | Yes |
| Support Streaming Video | Yes |
| Support Streaming Audio | Yes |
| Other Web Hosting Features | Details |
| Log Files + Site Stats | Yes |
| Customizable Error Pages | Yes |
| Web File Manager | Yes |
Conclusion: Should you go with Dot5 Hosting?
All characters even except for the customer support, would you consider taking up the hosting service for a cheaper price?
Hosting features for Dot5 Hosting are pretty the same with Hostmonster or Pow Web where you’ll get unlimited hosting capacity as well as domain names hosting – the only different is that Dot5 is offering the same features in a much lower price. Dot5Hosting might not have the best customer support in the business but their price is the cheapest. In case you’re looking for an cheap web hosting service with minimum technical support needed, then yes – you should go with Dot5.
Dot5 Hosting low cost hosting plan is superb but they are recommended for experienced webmasters only. Newbies that most likely need a lot of supports or help might just skip them due to the bad repurtation in customer supports. (Sidenote: For newbies who’re looking for cheap web hosting, I would recommend JustHost instead.)
