DaWebhost Introduction

DaWebhost was founded in 2003 and provides businesses with an all-in-one IT solution. In addition to shared web hosting, they offer a range of design and development services like mobile and web app development and UI design, as well as SEO services via their parent company Dotanimizers.com. Dotanimizers.com is an IT consultancy company and together with DaWebhost is headquartered in Sydney.

Services & Specializations

DaWebhost focuses on providing businesses with everything they need to get a website up and running at the lowest possible cost, including design, domain registration, SEO, and web hosting. They are truly a single vendor solution.

Their shared packages are what you would expect from a shared host, with web storage, bandwidth, MySQL databases, FTP and SSH access, unlimited email accounts and unlimited subdomains, a full suite of development languages (PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, JavaScript).

Access is granted via cPanel and phpMyAdmin. Each plan also includes access to the Fantastico script library. The Fantastico script library is an alternative to the more popular Softaculous, but includes many of the same open source applications, including:

• Mambo
• Drupal
• Joomla
• CubeCart
• ZenCart
• osCommerce
• Moodle
• WordPress

Fantastico also has scripts for project management sites, wikis, mailing lists, website builders, and image galleries. So no matter what your business is, with Fantastico, DaWebhost has the solution. Plus, they have additional data transfers, parked domains, add- on domains, and dedicated IP addresses for sales on a monthly basis, enabling maximum flexibility for their customers.

Customer Service

DaWebhost runs their customer service through a ticketing system and knowledgebase. They don’t offer any live support at all. In their terms of service, they don’t specify a timeframe for ticketing responses, and they stipulate that their customers have a good working knowledge of their site’s operation.

For timely updates, they do have an announcement section their website as well as a mechanism that lets customers check the status of their servers and the network.

Their knowledgebase is fully searchable but at the time of writing it only has one article in it. Moreover, when common searches terms like MySQL, FTP, or SSI were entered by the reviewer, they didn’t return any results.

Security and Backups

All of their accounts come with Spam Assassin for email security as well as Hotlink protection. However, that’s the only security that they provide. For their backups, they offer backups for all of their accounts, but in their terms of service they say that it’s the client’s responsibility to backup their own sites. The backups provided by DaWebhost are for server restorations only.

A backup manager tool is provided to help clients with local backups. If they make a mistake, then DaWebhost will attempt to help you recover your data. If data loss occurs because of client error, then DaWebhost will still help but they do charge a fee.

Billing & Payment Policies

DaWebhost has a tiered pricing structure for their shared hosting plans and offers discounts as contract length increases. They do not offer any refund for server time already used, no matter what. DaWebhost requires cancellation requests to be submitted 5 days prior to the next billing cycle or else you will be charged.

Conclusion

For a simple hosting company, DaWebhost is a good option, particularly if you want to work with an Australian company and particularly if you want to only deal with one vendor for everything.

However, those stipulations mean that you’re likely getting a less robust product and offering with regards to a support system. For some businesses, that trade is absolutely worth it; for others, more support is going to be required to get the hosting experience that they want.