CleverDot was established in 2002 and has been providing shared hosting and domain registration services since their inception. They’ve remained a smaller company that’s comfortable operating at their current scale. Currently, they provide hosting to U.S. and Canadian customers only. They’ve labelled themselves “the clever choice” because of their affordable and simple packages and their clever use of software.
Features and Ease of Use
Despite being a smaller hosting provider with a limited set of services, CleverDot still provides all the fundamentals such as:
- Domain registration
- SSL certificates
- Manual backup manager
- Antivirus protection
- Unlimited email accounts and forwarders
- MySQL databases
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- cPanel installation
They also provide a few other features that add a lot of value and utility to their web hosting plans:
- RVSiteBuilder: This is a popular tool for beginners to easily build a website. It includes a decent number of templates and a drag-and-drop interface.
- Softaculous: Softaculous is the most comprehensive script installer with dozens of hosting apps ready for installation at the click of your mouse.
- Search Engine Submission Tool: This makes sure that your website gets indexed by Google and other search engines as soon as possible.
CleverDot has put a bit of effort into making their platform easy to use. Their pricing is simple, the signup process is almost effortless, and they provide a great range of software to help even the most novice users set up polished-looking websites.
However, your account will only be activated within an hour upon making payment: I found this a bit slow considering most shared hosting providers activate accounts almost instantly. Plus, their website looks very dated. This is probably where CleverDot falls short of their bigger and operationally-stronger competitors, and may also indicate that their platform may not be the most convenient.
Pricing and Support
CleverDot only offers three shared hosting plans. However, the terms are very generous with no setup fees, an exceptional 60-day money back guarantee, and a choice of monthly or discounted yearly billing. You can also get a discount if you choose to register a domain name with your yearly plan.
The plans come with:
- Starter: 25 GB storage, 250 GB bandwidth, 25 databases, and support for a single website.
- Advanced: 50 GB storage, 1 TB bandwidth, unlimited databases, and up to ten websites.
- Pro: Everything is unlimited.
Although not the absolute cheapest, CleverDot’s packages are still in the more affordable range. The software and features you get with your hosting service also makes it pretty good value for money.
CleverDot only offers technical support through email; their phone line is for billing or order queries only. It seems like they offer a live chat, but every time I tried to access it, they were offline. However, in my experience, their support team responded promptly and was generally competent and helpful, even though it took multiple emails to resolve the issues. Unfortunately, their knowledge base has minimal help documentation, and they don’t regularly update their social media channels.
