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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.
  Reviewed 05/05/2007 14:34:38, by Darius Royle
(3.61 out of 10 - 20 votes)
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Reviews of this Site:
ak on 06/11/2007 10:02:50, said:
Dot 5 is the WORST host! I have had several problems with them, just to name a FEW: web mail down erasing whole email database billing issues AFTER canceling service - they still charged me for service!
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Comparison

General issues with web hosting companies

For those of you with Web sites, you probably know what a “host” is. It’s a company that provides a location, or address, on the Internet where your Web site resides. In other words, just like a physical business needs an address, so does a Web site. You can’t have a Web site and just “stick it up” on the Web. Unless you want to set up your own server, you have to go through a hosting company who gives you that address, including server space and bandwidth, that enables the search engines and visitors to find your site. Let’s look at some common problems we often have with hosting companies:
- You can never find an actual person to talk to! They may have a 24-hour customer service line open, but you can never get through to a real person.
- Hosting companies often think that the “lowest price” will always get the sale, but they fail to realize that what people really want is excellent customer service, servers that are up almost 100% of the time, and a variety of services that come with the hosting package.
- Many hosting companies don’t provide any other functionality other than Web site hosting. They don’t provide a “control panel” full of goodies such as PGP secure e-mail, shopping carts, log analysis, database creation, etc.
- Guess what? Technical support people often don’t make the best “customer support” people. They may be technical gurus, but their main interest lies in their high tech servers and other functionality, rather than solving the simple problems of their customers.
- In other words, weak customer service is a major problem with the majority of hosting companies these days.