Dotster Hosting Review 2021 - Plans & Price, Uptime & Speed

Dotster, established in 2000, is a big web hosting provider that has been serving for thousands of domains worldwide. This company releases Windows, Linux and VPS web hosting services so as to largely meet a wide range of customers’ demands. To figure out whether the Windows hosting service from this web host is worth a try, we make out this unbiased review.

This in-depth review, made with our expertise in recommending the best ASP.NET hosting providers, includes multiple key aspects in web hosting, such as hosting features, price, reliability, speed and technical support. Before starting with our review, we would like to show the following ratings on this company’s Windows hosting quality.

Plans & Fees

Dotster releases three selectable Windows hosting plans which are named as Basic, Deluxe and Ultra hosting plan severally. This company allows customers to purchase the mentioned hosting plans for no more than three years at the prices of $4.75/mo, $7.75/mo and $14.75/mo. Besides, although this provider claims to offer a time-limited official coupon code of FREEDOM 15 for webmasters who intend to buy its one-year service, there is no checkbox available for users to fill in the claimed coupon code actually.

Moreover, this web host offers a series of marketing offers for webmasters running online stores or social network websites, including $50 search marketing credit for Yahoo!/Bing, $100 AdWords bonus for Google and free YELLOWPAGES.COM listing and so forth. However, the limits is that this company only offers a 10-day money back guarantee for webmasters to ask for a refund.

Hosting Features

All of hosting plans endow unlimited disk space, data transfer and subdomains. In addition, they include drag-and-drop site builder, DNS management, web analytics tool, standard forwarding, auto-responder, email anti-virus and more. Moreover, the Windows plans come with an auto-installer – SimpleScripts, with which webmasters are able to get a quick installation of many third-party applications including Joomla, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress and CubeCart or more.

Although each plan shares some similar features, they have differently-distributed features in store for customers. To relieve unnecessary troubles and complexities, we also create the following table by selecting some significant features built in each of hosting plans.

By analysing many customers’ feedbacks, we find out that many users complain about this company doesn’t offer unlimited websites and bandwidth as it promises. Moreover, Dotster doesn’t show the specific version of the MySQL database, Windows and ASP.NET server. Also, there is no detailed information for whether it supports for other basic Windows features, such as separated application pool, Silverlight, MVC, LINQ and full trust.

Uptime & Speed

Dotster declares to deliver high uptime for customers by using redundant HVAC, humidity monitoring and constant temperature as well as independent dual power grid. However, it has never published any uptime statistics in public and indeed is not as good as it has promised. Actually, some users complain that their servers always crash every two or three days and it usually takes more than half an hour to back into normal.

In addition, this web host makes use of eco-friendly servers which are powered by renewable energy to ensure fast response speed for page and video loading. However, the truth tells a different story. From our day-and-night testing statistics, its average server and network response time is 794ms which is quite frustrating and slower than most hosting companies in the hosting industry.

Technical Support

In terms of technical support, there are three contact tunnels offered by this company, which include on-site live chat, toll-free phone call and email ticket. However, many webmasters state that the claimed support is hardly responsive, and it always takes more than half an hour for them to access the on-site staffs. Besides, its email support is especially slow and it sometimes takes more than one week to get response from the technical employees.

Conclusion

From what we have mentioned above, the Windows hosting from Dotster is NOT Recommended for people who desire a reliable, affordable, fast, high-efficiency and feature-rich Windows hosting service. In this case, we sincerely recommend the following excellent ASP.NET hosting companies.