Dotster has been around since 1999 and started as a domain registrar. In the early 2000s, Dotster switched over to web hosting and later the company was acquired by the industry giant, EIG. At the moment, there are around 160,000 domains active on Dotster which is a healthy customer base. This U.S.-based hosting provider is only available in English but supports domains from almost any country.
Features and Ease of Use
Dotster has its bases covered by providing all of the most essential features you expect from a hosting provider, for example:
- Register, transfer, or renew your domain.
- Web analytics tools to monitor the performance of your sites and user behavior.
- An email provider with spam filtering, security, and webmail check-in.
A few of their more unique features include:
- Website design services: You can hire an expert on the Dotster platform to design and build your website for you.
- A drag and drop site builder: Dotster provides their own basic website builder. It’s not great, but it’s easy to use and gets the job done for simple sites.
- Free applications: You can also use free applications like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla to build and manage your site.
vDeck is the hosting manager unless you have VPS hosting. It’s not the best, and I prefer working with other options, like cPanel. However, it’s a pretty straightforward interface that’s simple to navigate and use. You can manage all your databases, FTP transactions, and emails from the single dashboard. The signup process consists of three steps: Register your domain, confirm your selection, and add your billing info.
Pricing and Support
You can get Linux, Windows, or VPS hosting on Doster with Linux being the cheapest and VPS hosting the most expensive. There are three available pricing plans on Linux and Windows: Basic, Deluxe, and Ultra. A huge benefit of their pricing plans is that you get unlimited subdomains and storage space with all three as well as highly scalable bandwidth.
In the Deluxe and Ultra plans, you’ll enjoy the benefit of having unlimited domains. The Ultra plan goes even further by providing unlimited emails, FTP logins, and databases. Apart from these additional perks, all pricing plans come with a comprehensive set of features. Once you sign up, you can expect many extras to be offered, such as managed WordPress, extra domains, and more. They’ll make sure you have everything you need to enhance your hosting experience.
Plans are available on one, two, or three-year terms and the longer term you choose, the more you will save. There are no free plans, however, they do offer a 30-day refund period.
Dotster does have an extensive documentation site where you can explore to solve issues. Some articles are a bit out-of-date. However, their chat support is quick to respond to queries and don’t have those annoying automatic responses. I got a reply to a presale question in about 10 seconds and to a support query in just a few seconds longer.
