DotCanada Hosting Review: Hosting Your Site North of the US Border? Check Out This Simple Host
Our overview of DotCanada…
Expert Opinion
Hear from our web hosting expert, Spencer Grover.
Hosting Plans
Compare the best DotCanada hosting plans and their prices.
FAQs
Most asked Questions about DotCanada – answered!
dotCanada Introduction
dotCanada is a subsidiary of Light Speed Technologies, a Canadian hosting company providing solutions to businesses. They offer shared, reseller, and cloud hosting plans for individuals, small businesses, and enterprise companies.
Products and services
dotCanada offers a fairly standard rotation of shared, reseller, and cloud hosting options with a robust set of added extras included in the price.
Their shared hosting is structured in a tiered pricing system, with more money getting you more storage, more domains, more email storage, and a few other benefits like CloudFlare caching and backups. Their top hosting plans are also hosted on less crowded servers, guaranteeing you more resources, and come with priority support.
All their shared hosting plans include: unlimited bandwidth; one click installs and access to OS Commerce Shopping Cart; cPanel control; free website builder; spam Assassin Protection; Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and SSH Access; unlimited MySQL databases; servers are all run on LiteSpeed rather than Apache, with is up to nine times faster; and all servers are run on CloudLinux OS.
Their reseller plans are structured in much the same way, with all the same benefits and WHM cPanel access, R1Soft CDP Backups, and 100% white label hosting.
Finally, their cloud solution offers up to 12 CPUs with a corresponding amount of RAM, storage, and transfers. Customers have full root access, their choice of OS, private LAN between servers, NAS storage, and a secure firewall.
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Hardware and Datacenters
dotCanada runs four datacenters in Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Buffalo. Shared and reseller plans are hosted in Toronto and Buffalo. Like many hosting companies today, all of their plans are run on SSD drives for lower latency and more speed.
When it comes to their cloud plans, all customers are hosted on servers with Intel Xeon processors, but they don’t specify more detail than that.
Support and Guarantees
dotCanada has a knowledgebase and ticketing system, as well as a live chat function 24/7 and phone support.
They also have a 45-day money-back guarantee on all their plans, including cloud hosting. This excludes domain and setup up fees and any additional services you’ve purchased.
Second, they have a 100% uptime guarantee on their website, offering up to 24x service credit for any downtime. However, at the time of writing, there is no mention of an uptime guarantee in their terms of service. In fact, their ToS specifically mention that they “cannot guarantee the availability of (i) our Web site, (ii) any Customer Web site or other Web site, information or material hosted by us.”
Finally, they offer unlimited bandwidth on their shared plans, but do stipulate in their terms of service that they have the right to throttle your site if you exceed more than 2% of the server resources for more than 30 seconds.
Summary
All in all, dotCanada offers a clean and simple hosting product. For new website owners through to enterprise companies, their quality hardware and fast hosting environment give them an edge over many alternative hosting companies.
Most Popular DotCanada Hosting Plans
| WH-001 | Zero Downtime Hosting | CH-oo3 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disk Space | 1GB | 10GB | 5GB |
| Bandwidth | 40GB | 400GB | 250GB |
| Price |
$7.46 / mo
(Billed as $7.46 Per Month) ⓘPrices in are approximate, based on current exchange rates. The host will likely charge you in USD, or at a different exchange rate.
Usual price: – Get % off!
|
$11.23 / mo
(Billed as $7.46 Per Month) ⓘPrices in are approximate, based on current exchange rates. The host will likely charge you in USD, or at a different exchange rate.
Usual price: – Get % off!
|
$11.52 / mo
(Billed as $7.46 Per Month) ⓘPrices in are approximate, based on current exchange rates. The host will likely charge you in USD, or at a different exchange rate.
Usual price: – Get % off!
|
| Visit DotCanada | Visit DotCanada | Visit DotCanada |
| Plan | Disk Space | Bandwidth | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| WH-020 Shared |
20GB | 500GB | $11.63 / mo Visit Host |
| WH-999 Shared |
Unlimited | Unlimited | $15.79 / mo Visit Host |
| CH-oo6 Shared |
10GB | 500GB | $17.28 / mo Visit Host |
| RH-020 Shared |
20GB | 250GB | $19.97 / mo Visit Host |
| CH-oo12 Shared |
20GB | 1000GB | $23.04 / mo Visit Host |
| RH-040 Shared |
40GB | 500GB | $33.30 / mo Visit Host |
| RH-080 Shared |
80GB | 1000GB | $53.30 / mo Visit Host |
| CORE I3 Shared |
500GB | 12TB | $109 / mo Visit Host |
| XEON QUAD Shared |
500GB | 12TB | $169 / mo Visit Host |
| DUAL XEON QUAD Shared |
500GB | 12TB | $299 / mo Visit Host |
DotCanada Frequently Asked Questions
- Are bandwidth and storage on DotCanada’s hosting plans unlimited?
The plans limit the amount of disk space but offer unlimited bandwidth for its shared and reseller plans. However, its cloud storage plans limit both the bandwidth and storage space.
- Does DotCanada offer domain registrations?
Yes, you can register a domain with DotCanada, or transfer an existing one. It is possible to get a free domain if you sign up for hosting services for at least a year.
- What payment types are supported by DotCanada?
When signing up for hosting from the company, you are able to sign up for multiple payment plans including monthly and yearly plans.
Some plans only allow a monthly option while others allow a customer to pay 2 or 3 years upfront.
Multiple payment types are accepted including major credit cards and PayPal.
- Does DotCanada offer a money back guarantee?
The company offers a 45-day money back guarantee for its hosting plans. Unlike other companies, the refund also includes domain name purchases.
If you are not satisfied with your service, not only will DotCanada give your money back, they will also buy back your domain name.
- What is DotCanada’s customer support like?
DotCanada offers customers support through live chat, support tickets, contact form, and phone. Some technical support options such as live chat are available 24/7.
- Where are DotCanada’s datacenters?
Though the company’s main offices are in Canada, it has datacenters in multiple locations in both the USA and Canada including Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Buffalo.
Its datacenter locations feature the best in technology including HP blades with the latest Xeon processors and cloud infrastructure.
- What uptime guarantee does the company provide?
In an effort to stand out from other hosting providers, DotCanada provides its customers with a 100% uptime guarantee backed by an SLA. If this guarantee is not met, the company will offer a credit up to 24 times.
For example, if a customer’s website is down for an hour, they may get a credit for a day’s worth of service.
- What languages does DotCanada support to help me reach this goal?
DotCanada offers support for range of scripting and programming languages including Perl, Ruby on Rails, Python, and PHP to help you build custom websites as well as modify existing platforms.
- Will DotCanada help me with the process of transferring my old website?
The company will help its customers transfer both the domain name and website content to its new servers.
Though there are no extra fees with this service, DotCanada cannot offer a guarantee on transferring domain names belonging to another host or registrar.
Though the company will help you transfer items manually, there is no option available for automatic transfers.
- Does DotCanada offer any backup plans?
The company does not backup any customer website data. It is up to the customer to make the necessary backups to not lose important data.
- How much storage is available for email and how many addresses can I use?
Customers selecting a host plan can create an unlimited number of email accounts but storage is limited by the amount of email storage specified by the plans.
- Is it possible for me to host more than one website on a single plan?
Many of DotCanada’s plans allow customers to host more than one website.
For some plans, an unlimited amount of websites are allowed. So it is possible to register for more than one domain and manage it with a single plan.
Even though the plans may not charge extra to manage more than one domain, domain registration for additional domains will be extra.
- What control panels are supported?
DotCanada supports the industry standard cPanel control panel to help customers set up and administer their websites.
- What tools does DotCanada offer people without coding expertise to easily setup websites?
With DotCanada’s single click installs, customers can easily install popular platforms like WordPress and Joomla to quickly start a blog or set up a simple website.
In addition, the company offers a Website Builder at no extra charge which does not require scripting or coding skills.
- What security features or plans does the company offer?
Though there are no specific plans targeting security aspects of hosting, DotCanada does offer a Firewall for its Cloud Hosting plans that allows you to block or grant access filtered by IP address or port.
- What features does DotCanada offer to support ecommerce sites?
If you are interested in creating an online store, you can use the one-click install feature to set-up and administer online store platforms such as Cubecart and OpenCart.
You can also purchase and configure SSL certificates for your plans in order to accept online payments.
- Will DotCanada support an image-based website?
Since the plans come with ample disk space based on SSD technology that allows for responsive websites, it is possible to host a site with many images.
There is also a one-click install for a gallery that will allow you to present the images in a particular format.
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