Setup: 4/26/07

I signed up for service at 17:52 on the 26th, and by 17:58 my WHM/cPanel account was active. I set up my personal domain and got all that good stuff ready, and my site was running smooth (well at least the non-DB-driven portions because I was too lazy to import my DBs at that time).

I had a few questions, and Andrew & Co. were quick to get me answers. Definitely a positive first impression!

7-day update: 05/04/07

:agree::agree::agree::agree::agree:

I've had a few setup hiccups, all my own doing (wanting to do strange things or looking in the wrong place for something in the control panels), but otherwise the site's been running smoothly and the service has been top notch.

I've submitted trouble tickets, some to request additional services, some to make inquiries about availability of services and how to access them, and some just because I don't always know as much as I think I do. Response times are listed here along with the time I submitted them (in CDT, Dathorn's time zone):

1 minute (16:29)
3 minutes (20:07)
9 minutes (22:17)
9 minutes (22:22)
10 minutes (20:14)
13 minutes (15:12)
1 hour, 1 minute (midnight)

This makes the average response time 15 minutes, with a mean response time of just under 9 minutes. Those are some impressive numbers; even the 1 hour response is amazing in my book, given that I submitted the ticket at midnight.

I'm liking the service so far :)

sounds good! :agree:

Looks like you've found a host to stay with. :)

Please share a domain that you host with them. If you don't want to do it in public, feel free to just send it to the moderating team via http://www.webhostingtalk.com/report.php?p=4491005, and a simple confirmation will be posted here. Thank you!

7+ month update: 12/11/07

:agree::agree::agree::agree::agree:

Although I'm by no means a heavy duty user, my hosting service with Dathorn has been rock solid and fast. I've put up photo albums, created a TinyURL-type service for friends and family, and a bunch of other random stuff (not to mention a whole lot of PHP and SQL experimentation), and have been happy with it all.

Andrew and the rest of the support staff have been very prompt and courteous in responding to my trouble tickets, even those of the PEBCAK variety. I wish more companies had customer service like this!

Top notch product, and top notch support to back it up!

Looks like you found a great outfit. Do they offer jsp support under the Reseller plans?

Q...

Thank you for the update. It's always good to have good news. :)

BTW, thank you for providing a domain. It is indeed hosted by Dathorn, so the review is validated. Sorry for the lack of confirmation. For the record, you did send it back in May as well.

Looks like you found a great outfit. Do they offer jsp support under the Reseller plans?

Q...

Not sure really... you'd have to ask Andrew. Last time I was on here, he seemed fairly active, so he should get back to you within the next day or two at the latest. If you want a quicker reply, you could always email your question to sales@dathorn.com - they reply pretty quickly :)

Whoa, it's already been over a year!

I've had no problems with Dathorn yet; half of the support tickets I've submitted have just been questions, and over half of the remaining tickets I've submitted turned out to be user error. Nevertheless, Andrew and his crew have always been quick to respond.

The average response time across the 19 tickets I've submitted since my last review here is a bit over 16 minutes, with the longest wait being 1 hour and 20 minutes. All the responses that took over 20 minutes were to my late-night tickets, which I consider quite impressive.

I've not noticed any downtime, and the server response has always been snappy. I upgraded a week or so ago to the "Professional" plan, and was given an extra 60GB/mo transfer as a bonus. I think I'm going to be staying with Dathorn for a long time! :)

Thank you for revisiting your thread... blog... thing. It's good to have regular updates with figures. :)

Well it's been over 2.5 years! I have an account with HostNine as well now, to provide greater overhead for some of my planned projects, but for my core web site as well as email services, I'm still very happy with Dathorn! I don't recall when the last time I had to submit a ticket is, and the only downtime I've experienced was due to some DNS fudgery on my part (I have my DNS hosted elsewhere and probably muck about with it far more often than I should).

As the saying goes... no news is good news ;) :agree:

Well it's been over 2.5 years!

Time flies indeed. :)

Dathorn is rock solid. I was with them for 6 years mar 2003- may 2009.

Nice to see they have been keeping you happy over the years. Congrats to them for the great service.

I remember when I had a reseller account with Dathorn. At the time they were quite the bargain 2GB/30GB for $13.50 a month.

How is Andrew doing these days? I haven't seen him post on WHT in quite some time.

I'm still around; busy as always and quietly lurking when I have a moment ;)

Thanks everyone and Happy Holidays!

Well it has come time to bring this blog to a close; I have enjoyed nearly three years of trouble-free service from Dathorn, and would still highly recommend them to anyone who wants rock-solid reliable hosting. Unfortunately my budget requires that I trim some excess, and with three hosting accounts currently, one had to go. I had to choose my Dathorn account because it was the easiest to consolidate into my other accounts - one is a VPS with multiple BG processes, and the other has multiple logins for sites for my friends and family, whereas Dathorn just had the "core" of my site and email hosting.

I actually found it hard to press that "Submit" button on my cancellation ticket, that's how much I've enjoyed my service with Dathorn. So in closing, let me restate that I have had nothing but good things to say about them in my three years of service with them, and that I will still recommend them to anyone who asks. Thanks Andrew, and maybe one day my budget will allow me to do business with you again!

Thank you for this final review Doktor Jones. It's a bit unfortunate that we won't have you updating us anymore on how things go over at Dathorn, but life must go on.

Well, I've had sites with dathorn for more than seven years, which would say something in itself - reliable, fast, and most importantly with the expertise to solve problems that arise. That last point is especially important, because bad things inevitably happen, and it's important to have someone who knows what they are doing able to fix it, and fast. Both with a problem on my site, or with a server.