 Dot5 Hosting has quickly risen from relative obscurity to a top player, hosting thousands of customers at the iPowerweb data center (with whom they are a "Power Partner"). Their website is crisp and professional, and offers a wide range of bonus features on all accounts, including web templates, bulletin board and ecommerce software, and multimedia streaming support.
Reliability
We had a few hiccups during our time with Dot5, but nothing serious. Sometimes there were delays in the load times of PHP content, which became an off and on occurrence. The problem cleared up after some time and was not apparent throughout the rest of the test. That’s pretty good, being that when a problem like that develops, it is seldom resolved. Not many hosts are willing to put in the effort necessary to reduce server load once a problem with it develops. This is an indication of Dot5’s commitment to resolve even the more difficult issues that arise.
Price Value
Dot5 offers free domain registrations with its 1 and 2 year billing cycles and has no setup fee on any account or billing cycle. Not bad. For only $4.95 per month, Dot5 allows you to manage up to 6 domains on one account. With 200 GB space and 2000 GB monthly transfer shared between them, it's great value even if you only need to host a single domain. Their base package gives you all the features required to host your personal website or small business site and provides all of the space and flexibility you need to expand. Their plans include a fully-equipped Marketing Centre, a Web Site Creator, as many Shopping Carts as you need, a Search Engine Submitter, Search Engine Submitter Reports, a Keyword and Meta-Tag Generator, a Website Link Checker, and $50 Overture credit. All of this, at the price they offer, is a genuine deal.
Control Panel
Dot5’s control panel is the award-winning vDeck control panel system. This is one of many popular control panel systems on the market, and there is nothing wrong with this one. We found it responsive and fairly easy to use. It provides pretty comprehensive control over your hosting account and allows for easy adjustments to your services. There are hardly any performance issues with the control panel. In fairness, these were very brief and not extensive enough to render the control panel unusable.
Customer Support
Dot5’s customer support is good and prompt. We are fairly pleased with our experience with them and this went a long way in their achieving the #3 slot on our chart. It's difficult to overstate the benefits of fast, courteous, knowledgeable support. Anyone with none to turn to for help learns very quickly how important good customer support is and Dot5 is clearly aware of this. They offer 24/7 support, with a sophisticated support site built into their system. They also provide a toll-free number, a ticket system, a comprehensive knowledgebase and even a downloads section (although rather sparse) providing commonly needed tools. |
