Dynadot.com Review

Dynadot is a privately held company offering various web services including domain registration, email hosting, website building, SSL certificates, email and web hosting. Short for “dynamic dot”, the company’s name alludes to the dynamic web services they offer. Besides domain registration, Dynadot also offers Domain Privacy services and an entire domain marketplace, where you can sell, buy, and participate in domain auctions.

The scope of this Dynadot review is to get you up to speed with the website building, web hosting, and email hosting plans offered by Dynadot, and the features of their website hosting services.

Dynadot.com Overview

Founded in 2002 by Todd Hann, Dynadot is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and hosting provider. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, Canada, with international offices in Toronto, Canada, Beijing and Zhengzhou, China.

Dynadot.com is primarily known as a domain registrar with website building and hosting being complementary services. While most people know about Dynadot, the domain registrar, there aren’t many insights about their hosting and site building services. This Dynadot.com review will focus on these complementary services in particular.

Dynadot Plans & Pricing

We’ll start with Dynadot’s hosting services that include VPS hosting and email hosting.

Dynadot offers a single VPS plan priced at $10/month. While this is indeed a good price for a VPS plan, Dynadot requires you to pay for all 12 months upfront, however, a discount is offered based on a currently available promotion, which gets you 2 months off (instead of the regular $120/year, the price is just $100/year).

Here are the specs you can expect to get with your Dynadot virtual private server: 1 Core CPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk space, 1 TB bandwidth, 99.9% uptime. This in an unmanaged VPS plan with SSH and full root access, so you can install any software that runs on your chosen OS.

When you sign up for the VPS plan, you can choose from the following OS options: CentOS 6.7, CentOS 6.7 with Sentora, Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 12.04 with LAMP, Ubuntu 12.04 with WordPress, and CentOS 6.5 with ZPanel. The VPS plan also comes with a free dedicated IPv6. At checkout, you can add the Website Builder Pro for $5.

Dynadot’s email hosting service costs $11.99/year and includes 30 MB disk space, 3 GB bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, 1 FTP account, and 99.9% uptime. The email hosting control panel includes site statistics including unique visitors, page hits, recent hits, etc. With the help of the control panel, you can set up your email with any email client (Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.), and you can easily access your mails from mobile devices.

The website builder tool available at Dynadot offers 6 mobile-ready templates, SEO tools, social media integration, simple blog tool, free domain and email address with the business plan, inline editing, style editor (customize colors, fonts, page configurations), possibility to add custom code, and free VPS hosting.

The free version (ad-supported version) of the website builder gives you access to mobile-ready templates (you can create up to 5 pages), domain linking, customer service. There are two paid subscriptions, one costing $5/month (Pro plan), while the other plan costs $15/month (Business plan).

The Pro plan offers unlimited pages, a free domain name with annual plans, SEO tools, one-click domain linking, mobile responsive templates, custom code editor and one-click domain linking. The Business plan includes all the features of the Pro plan, and offers a professional email address, eCommerce shopping cart, and unlimited contributors.

SSL certificates are also available for purchase at Dynadot. You can opt for an Alpha SSL certificate (chained root certificate) for $16.99/year or for a Wildcard SSL for $80/year.

Dynadot Hosting Features

The single VPS plan offered by Dynadot comes with the following hosting features:

• Full root access;
• KVM virtualization;
• WordPress preinstalled;
• RAID 10 SDD storage and data redundancy;
• Intel Xeon CPU;
• Free web hosting control panel (with some OSs);
• Free dedicated IPv6.

Since this in an unmanaged VPS hosting plan, it’s not suitable for beginners or those without any server management experience. The plan is geared towards more advanced users with the technical skills to manage their own software installations and troubleshoot issues with this VPS on their own. Therefore, server management support is not included with this plan.

Dynadot Customer Support

Customer support is offered through help files available for each product category, community forums, and online chat. A phone number is also available where you can reach the Dynadot team. The Dynadot website features a blog as well, which is continuously updated. The community forums are also very active.

Pros & Cons of Dynadot

These pros and cons will be limited to Dynadot’s hosting and website building services, without taking into account their domain registration services. Thus, the advantages and disadvantages of Dynadot.com can be summed up as follows:

Pros

• Free website builder tool with mobile-responsive templates;
• Affordable email and web hosting;
• VPS hosting with some website builder plans;
• 99.9% uptime;
• Free domain name with some website builder plans.

Cons

• A single unmanaged VPS plan;
• No other VPS plans or other web hosting options;
• The Business website builder plan costs 3 time as much as the Pro plan while offering only a extra features compared to the Pro plan;
• Web hosting service not suitable for beginners.

Their VPS hosting plan can be a good choice for technically apt individuals who want all their hosted services to be at the same provider, however, seeing how it’s an unmanaged plan, it’s a definite no-go for beginners.

Dynadot.com Review Conclusion

While Dynadot fares well as an ICANN accredited domain registrar, offering affordably priced domains and a domain marketplace, by analyzing their other services it becomes clear that neither web hosting, nor their website builder are the focus of their services. While they do offer mobile-responsive templates, there are only 6 templates that you can choose from. The free website builder is also very limited, allowing you to create only 5 pages.

To sum up, Dynadot.com is a good option for domain registration related services, but their web hosting and site-building tools are not for everyone.