Dotster Tracking Order Status

These guys are scoundrels. We've been with them for 10+ years and all of a sudden I go into the system to add a forwarding email address and can't find the page I need. Got in touch with support and was told they'd discontinued that feature. They hadn't notified me of that. And they had already turned off access to the info. I told them I needed to get the records of the email addresses I was having forwarded and they said it was impossible. Even a tech support person couldn't get to the information. About a week later I finally received notification that they were discontinuing email forwarding. A LITTLE LATE! At that point they gave customers 10 days before they shut off forwarding. It seems they've recently merged or been acquired by web.com. Not a good sign. I recommend staying away from both. I still haven't found a replacement solution so I'm stuck up a creek without a paddle.

I am using this provider just to park and renew my domain, so can't speak about other services. Their system had an issue with my c/c renewal, and that earned me a lock out from my account. No explanation, nothing. After five minutes I got a text confirming my card was charged, at which point I was able to login again. So, it seems you get temporarily "cancelled" while their system is figuring out online banking. And if it doesn't... well, nothing you can do.

Dotster are a pretty good price for hosting, always have been. However my fees have tripled in the last few years, though still better price than most. In the last year, there have been serious problems with their hosting. Websites not reachable, FTP not connecting, control panel not accessible. At this point my sites or my ability to edit WP (to log in) are unavailable every couple of weeks for hours. This used to be a very rare occurrence, maybe every couple of years, now it's frequent. The help chat was quite good in past years, it was clear the people I chatted with had some actual knowledge of servers, WP and hosting. In the last year I get a lot of meaningless replies from people who clearly have no idea what is wrong or how to fix it. Often they will default to "engineers are working on it, come back in 2 hours." But sometimes you get someone capable. The price cant be beat, but its not worth anything if it doesn't stay online.

I have been with these guys for ages - back in the Namezero "free domain for life" days. I have stuck with them out of loyalty but primarily because of their free email forwarding with unlimited email aliases per domain. In the past I have had the odd reports of bounces for some of my forwards. However over the last year or so instances of missed emails due to bouncebacks have increased to the point where I find their email forwarding service unreliable and frankly unusable. It appears that many of the IPs of the service they use for email fowarding (eighbox.net) are blacklisted. I contacted Dotster support and they appear well aware of the issue and simply rotate the IPs used. This isn't really a solution. I know the forwarding service is "free" however i can't afford to play russian roulette and potentially miss important emails. I have migrated the email fowarding for my domains to a paid service. I will eventually transfer my domains as without the draw of free email fowarding, I really have no incentive to stick with Dotser. I'm really sorry it had to end this way.

Our experience with Dotster has been fair. We have a learned a lot about web development on a shared hosting platform. Overall it has been an acceptable shared hosting solution. The user interface is fairly straight forward. Dotsters 24/7 tech support is typically knowledgeable. We never hesitated to frequently call into support to keep our site running properly. We hosted our first website on dotster for 6 years. The domain is still up. Sometimes we have to call in to have the database and server updated. Not often however we have experienced short periods of downtime. Due to server overloads from high levels of traffic during development sprints. Expect to be very hands on. Their Knowledge Base documentation is very robust. Extra time spent exploring the post is valuable. We are fascinated by what options Dotster may provide in the future if any for dedicated cloud hosting as a service. Have a super day in the land of the living. Later.