Product Review: Dotster Domains and Hosting

About the company: "With nearly three million Internet domains, Dotster, Inc. is one of the largest ICANN-accredited domain name registrars in the world. Launched in 2000, Dotster was among the first to offer long-term registrations and discounted pricing. Customers now turn to Dotster for its ability to deliver creative, marketable, and hard-to-find domain names through its proprietary NameSpin and Namewinner services. Dotster offers superior online account management tools and dedicated support from its customer care team in Washington state. The company's services include web hosting, DNS management, website development and marketing services, and partner programs."

The big pitch: Transfer your domain to Dotster for $8.95 and get one year of free web hosting. Hosting packages start at $8.95 per month, whois privacy for $2.99 per year.

Dotster has grown pretty damn fast over the last few years, and at first glance it's hard to see why. They charge a little more per month than other web hosting outfits, they charge for domain transfers, which other companies do for free, they charge you a few bucks to keep your whois details private, again something that others do for free (and Dotster did for free not long ago), and their domain registrations, at $14.95 per year, pale in comparison to the $3 and $2 registrations you can get from hosting chop shops like GoDaddy.

So why are people using Dotster when they're not scraping the bottom of the barrel on price?

Well, for starters, the company does what it promises. The basic web hosting account brings you 3GB of bandwidth, 100MB of storage, up to 50 email accounts and nifty extras like personal photo albums and web blogs, spam filtering and virus protection. They also offer Linux hosting, which people who are sick of Microsoft's continual security issues and bug problems seem to think is a big deal.

Dotster domain registrations include free URL forwarding, free domain parking, free SpamShield, free TransferLock, and free ownership transfers, additionally, you can have 25MB of MySQL database space, chat server software, shopping cart scripts, content management scripts, online calendars, blah blah blah.

But, see, here's the thing... the first rule of picking a web host is to know as much as you can about that webhost up front. Who are they? Where do they come from? What's their business model? Will I spend money on ten years of domain registration, only to find the company goes bankrupt next June? Will they charge my credit card for all sorts of things I didn't ask for?

I'm not saying any of that applies to Dotster, but without some detailed company info on their website (and there is none that I could find), it's hard to tell people to send their money there. What's the size of Dotster's pipe? What's their uptime? Sorry folks, but I have no idea, because they don't make the info clear.

Clearly lots of people aren't too concerned about that, since Dotster looks after the hosting of 3 million different accounts, but AOL has millions of users too and you wouldn't find me recommending them for an ISP.

So where do we go from here? Should you move your website away from GoDaddy to Dotster or not? Well, there are things that work in Dotster's favor. From consumer reports, we've noticed that although the company doesn't make a phone number available to customers, they do respond to customer service issues in a helpful way (just via email, so hope you're not in a hurry). Their control panel is a breeze to use, something that GoDaddy could learn some things about, and they deliver what they say they will, unlike the much-maligned Verio web hosting company.

One potential snafu with Dotster is that, if you want to take your website away from them and put it elsewhere, they'll expect to be paid $25 for the privilege. Though they're not the only ones that do this kind of thing, it is, to our way of thinking, utter and outright extortion.

So should you use Dotster? Well, we'd lean towards not, at least not right now. Sure, you should move your site away from GoDaddy pronto, but we're not entirely sure that Dotster is the way to go, unless of course you're okay with long, long term deals that might be a little bit more expensive than the other guys, but are easy to use and won't break your website in the meantime.

If you want to leave your website in one place for a few years, definitely go with Dotster. But it you're one of the many that want the option to leave if things take a negative turn, we'd suggest you keep looking.

The Product Trends rating: A good, solid option, but the lack of company info, lack of support phone number, and sneaky fees that you're hit with once you're stuck with them is a definite red light. Be assured, those negatives are minor issues when it comes to your web hosting/domain registration experience, but they're worth noting. The Product Trends Magazine rating on Dotster is three stars.

To try Dotster for yourself, click the image below:

posted by Oz @ 12:24 PM