Dot5 offers simple hosting options in an industry that can get pretty complicated.
They primarily cater to the first-time website owners and bloggers who want to start with something cheap and simple.
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Dot5 hosting was pretty popular just a few years ago.
Here is how they’ve trended over the years:
Features
Dot5 offers some cool features that inexperienced website owners might really find useful.
Here are some of them:
1) Professional Services: Dot5 wants to make great websites and hosting available to people who aren’t technically knowledgeable. They make it easy by only offering one shared hosting plan that does it all. They continue that simplicity by offering a range of professional services to go along with your new hosting account. If you want to sell products from your physical store online, they can set up an online shop right on your website.
Dot5 will also handle sending out your email newsletter, and set up a blog so you can post to to it regularly. If you need images or logos, their designers will help. Anything you need to get going they offer it. You can also rely on this host to perform regular maintenance like updates, like upgrading WordPress. The professional services offered by Dot5 are great for someone who needs helping getting and staying online.
2) Marketing Services: Now that your website is up and running you can start to push targeted traffic to your pages, and (if it’s your goal) begin to make money. Getting ranked in search engines, like Google, is difficult and marketing your new site can be expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why Dot5 offers marketing services to show your site to the right people and help you start earning fast.
These services can include suggesting enhancements to your current site for better conversions, local advertising for small businesses to attract people close to you, and search engine optimization help to make Google start sharing your website with the rest of the world.
3) Easy Google Integration: Google offers some of the best tools to stay organized and work online. They have products that range from word processors and spreadsheets in Google Drive, their popular web browser, Chrome, and social options (YouTube, Google+, and Hangouts).
Using these tools benefits a lot of web masters with relaying information, creating content, and engaging visitors. Dot5 has realized the benefits of the suite of Google products and has made it easy to integrate them with your hosting service. By having these trusted tools accessible right from your control panel, you’ll be able to fluidly save documents and use the highly intuitive Gmail email platform.
Setting up calendars and collaborating with colleagues on your site will be incredibly simple with this integration. It’s $5/mo, which is a reasonable price if you’re already heavily using Google’s tools.
Customer Support
Dot5 offers live chat available 24/7, along with a US telephone number and a ticketing system for customers to reach their support team.
Doesn’t appear that their Twitter account is too active, so probably not much help there.
Reviews
We looked over different online review sites to find honest opinions about Dot5. Users here have good things to say about the host’s affordable pricing.
One long-time customer writes: “Been using dot5 for several years. Very user friendly, good prices, and great tech support. Very happy with dot5.”
Another reviewer writes: “Their affordable packages, cheap domains are one of the reasons that Dot 5 Hosting has become one of the most popular web hosting packages.”
We also found negative reviews for Dot5. Some users here are upset with billing issues and resolution wait times.
One frustrated reviewer warns: “After repeated requests to cancel services with the company, they continued to charge my credit card. For some reason it was impossible for them to reimburse the full amount that was charged.”
Another disappointed customer writes: “I’ve had to wait on the phone now for over 3 hours and they have only made the situation worse. This use to be an inexpensive way to get your web page up, but now they have extra charges for everything.”
Pros
1) Simple Pricing Structure: Dot5 only offers one hosting plan. You can get this plan for slightly less if you sign up for 2 years instead of just one.
2) Generous Site Promotions: Because Dot5 only offers one hosting plan you know you are getting everything they have to offer. This includes $100 Google adwords credit, $100 Yahoo search credit, best of the web, and Constant Content email marketing.
3) QuickStart Wizard: This tool is designed to help you get started fast by walking you through selecting a domain, setting up your email account, and then creating your site. Link for the quickstart wizard demo is available on their homepage.
4) Advanced Hosting Technology: The network infrastructure is comprised of a pooled server environment for faster load times. They are also sporting load balancers, redundant routers, and mirrored storage backups to protect your site.
5) Fully Loaded Features: With features like unlimited disk storage, unlimited domain hosting on one account, a free domain name, google webmaster tools, DIY tutorials and professional web templates you know you’ll have everything you need to get started.
Cons
1) Limited options: Dot5 only offers linux based hosting and they only offer one hosting plan.
2) No Uptime Guarantee: Their website doesn’t mention an uptime guarantee or have server tracking.
3) vDeck: Dot5’s control panel is vDeck which is less aesthetically pleasing and not as good as cPanel or Plesk according to some users.
4) Limited Ecommerce: Dot5’s ShopSite online store is limited to only 15 products. No other options are available if your store grows.
Summary
If you need to host a website, but don’t want to deal with complicated options or overpriced plans then Dot5 may be one of the best options for you. Their simple, but effective and affordable plans and other features make this a perfect host for beginners and business owners who just need a site.
Due to the lack of features, anyone looking for more versatile options or specialty hosting will probably want to look elsewhere.