Given the number of random hits I get from Google, I've often thought about doing reviews of products and services. I noticed recently that dot5 has been advertising on sites that I frequent, and felt I should alert the public about my experience with them.
Dot5Hosting has been running ads for < $5 / month web hosting for some time now. I hosted two sites on dot5's servers from 2002 to 2004. In that time, my first iteration of Hollinger.Net (available on
archive.org ;-) ) was up and down sporadically. After a few months of this, I started using an
uptime tracker from OpenACS to find out just when the site dropped off, and resurfaced. Over time, I noticed that the site would become increasingly unavailable, to the point where it would be offline for a half day or more. Here's my (long) list of complaints:
- Hollinger.net dropped offline every few days. I'd complain, and be told "we're working on it." My requests for more technical details were always skirted.
- When my website went down, www.dot5hosting.com went down. They hosted their own site on a cruddy server!
- At one point, their server was so totally broken, instead of showing me the dot5 website, it showed me the source code for their website, including the username and password for the mysql database that drove their official website, and probably other items as well. I had to email them to get them to change it so sensitive customer information wouldn't be available.
- Absolutely IGNORANT customer service. Here's an example:
From: Michael Hollinger michael@hollinger.net
To: billing@dot5hosting.com
Date: Aug 8 2003 - 4:09pm
Hi, I’m thinking of closing my account shortly, and am curious to know what you policy is on yearly accounts. I assume you pro-rate the account balance, according to the amount of time left until the end of the billing year. Please let me know how that works, the domain in question is Hollinger.net.
Mike Hollinger
The response, a day and a half later:
From: billing@dot5hosting.com
To: michael@hollinger.net
Date Aug 9 2003 - 11:49pm
Hello Mike,Thank you for your recent e-mail.Your account is up for renewal on "2003/10/08".Please do not hesitate to contact me with any further questions you may have regarding this matter.Kind regards,
Cindy Cindysupport@dot5hosting.com
We look after our customers, or someone else will
It doesn't address my question, and even states what I said in my own email.
- When they decided to "migrate" my site to a new server, they screwed it up several times in a row. Here's a telling email (emphasis added by me, and YES, they did write "$guess..." in an email):
From: Dot5Hosting Migration Team (admin@dot5hosting.com)
To: mholling@hollinger.net
Date: Sep 10 2003 - 12:05am
Due to a miscommunication with our vendor, we must postpone the migration of ns1. Our new target date is $(guess at a date next week) but this may change. We will post a firm date 48 hours prior to the beginning of the migration.
The migration of ns37 is currently under way and on schedule.
Please bear with us as we upgrade these servers. They will directly contribute to improved uptimes and more responsive webspace for you and your customers.
Best Regards,
Dot5Hosting Migration Team
- My site mysteriously shut down one day. I emailed them, and found out that my invoice was past due with no warnings! That was the final straw, and what got me onto my current (great) host, Hurricane Electric.
- In dot5's typical sloppy fashion, I continued to recieve correspondence from them after I closed out my account.
- They refused to give me a copy of my data after I closed my account out, ordering me to pay up a full $60, or go without. I went without, and launched a second revision of the site. Jerks.
- Throughout all this, my email was touch and go, because it was apparently my fault for not trusting dot5's shoddy support to do my DNS as well. I run DNS through the excellent easyDNS instead, which is why I could so easily change service providers. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd registered the site through dot5, and left them total control.
- Just a few weeks ago, another site, wildcat-creek.com came up for renewal. I spent 4 days working with their still ignorant technical support to figure out how to transfer the domain elsewhere. The other companies involved pointed toward dot5. dot5hosting was totally clueless. I eventually gave up fighting with those idiots and just let the site expire.
Don't ever, EVER, EVER use dot5hosting! Here's a bunch of people that agree with me:
