I am leaving Dathorn.com shared hosting after being with them for about 2 years. I thought I would write a review while the experience was fresh. I am leaving Dathorn because due to growth, I want to move from shared to a dedicated server.

Like many people, before coming to Dathorn I had bounced between hosting companies because of poor service, companies that simply closed up shop, and providers with plans that did not keep up with the times.

While I was with Dathorn, Andrew doubled everyone's bandwidth and disk space for free, including mine. When my web site was hacked due to a bad script, Andrew detected it probably nearly immediately and told me about it so I could get the problem fixed.

In 2 years, subjectively, my sites were up 100% of the time --at least myself and my users never noticed any downtime.

Support questions were answered and solved within 15 minutes. (And I tend to work late at night.) The server ran so well I did not need support very often.

While with Dathorn, I would say that my sites were protected with a fierce zeal. Given the reliability of Dathorn, leaving Dathorn is a little bit like leaving home where Mom always has an apple pie in the oven. Okay, maybe Andrew never baked me an apple pie, but you get my drift. He kept my servers up!

So, I heartily endorse Dathorn for shared hosting.

--Rick Beall

Glad to hear Dathorn took good care of you. :)

Rick,

Thank you for sharing your experience with Dathorn!

It is nice to hear good things about this industry. I fully support the "Mom-and-Pop" operations, as I am one myself!

Customer support is key, and I have found rarely that people want to take time to address issues in detail, particularly when they are a bit more complex.

I also come to learn that excellent customer support is expensive and might be hard to come by.

My hosting needs are small: About 13 clients with simple sites, totaling to less then 1 GB.

Do you think I would be well served with Dathorn? Does Andrew help with transferring sites over, and does he charge extra for that type of favour?

Thanks for anyone's input!

Peter

Hi avalonsprings,

My guess is that you would thrive at Dathorn. If you are currently using CPanel, then I believe Dathorn would transfer you over for free (be sure to check) to the Dathorn CPanel accounts.

--Rick

Hi Rick,

Great! Thanks for letting me know!...........I contacted Andrew, and he offered to move my cpanel accounts for free!.............I am about to do that, or even consider to open a Dathorn account as a "back-up" solution. The price is great, and Andrew responded kindly and promptly, just as you predicted!...........

Thanks again,

Peter

I, too, have had two very satisfying years with Dathorn. Rick is right, the responsiveness of Andrew & his team is fantastic. Even a complete crash of the box my site was on was recovered and restored in a methodical and professional manner - with plenty of communication and no ego.

Speaking of crashes, this here is a web hosting trainwreck: http://forums.dathorn.com/showthread.php?t=2640

24 hours and counting, and it looks like those of us without backups are likely out of luck. I moved to Dathorn to avoid this kind of amateur service!

it looks like those of us without backups are likely out of luck.

That is not the case at all as I tried to explain in that forum thread and as I've discussed with you in your ticket. Though hopefully this stresses the importance of maintaining some sort of backups either through our own backup service or on your own since your accounts are small.

Personally I think WHM’s configurations should be backed up by the provider and all users should be responsible for their own data. Nonetheless Dathorn clearly communicates the responsibility of backups lies with the user, and provides an extra service to that end. So, even if you disagree, the user has no argument.

As far as the amount of time this server has been down, something like this is clearly frustrating for everyone, including Andrew, and perhaps niteswmr has a valid gripe concerning the downtime. I will say this, not so much in defense, but a simple observation, Andrew is clearly a good - and I believe honest - communicator. There is a lot of value in honest detailed communication. When you have someone who is willing to put themselves at what later can be microscopic scrutiny due to that detail communication, it is a welcomed attribute in what is a large amount of egocentric and obfuscatory web hosting culture.

I definitely agree on the honest + good communicator comment, and can't fault Andrew in the slightest on that. However, 24 hour+ downtimes (including for those paying for the backup service it appeared) are really pretty bad. Ultimately a fairly small amount of data was lost, but having websites down and most incoming mail bouncing for a day was a poor outcome. Andrew's links to Alertra show this kind of incident to be pretty rare, but it doesn't make it any easier or acceptable when it happens.

Well back to the specific review provided...
I am glad to see that you found a host that you could depend on for 2 years. Best of luck with the dedicated server provider that you choose.

i was with dathorn ling too, we had some issues, but andrew was very professional and we never got any problems . dathorn provdes excellent service