Domain.com hosting review for begginers

Our Verdict

Our Verdict

Domain.com stands out as a highly favored domain registrar, offering enticing starting rates from $11.99 annually for top-level domains like .com. Its extensive collection of distinctive domain extensions adds to its appeal. Apart from domain registration, Domain.com provides various related services, including web hosting, business email, SSL certificates, and antivirus plans through SiteLock. Delve deeper into Domain.com's offerings and suitability for your needs in our review.

Pros

• Affordable pricing
• User-friendly interface
• Wide range of domain extensions

Cons

• Mixed reviews
• Renewal rates
• Limited hosting options

4.5

Our ratings take into account a product's cost, features, ease of use, customer service and other category-specific attributes. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

Starting price

$11.99 for your first year

Free SSL certificate

Yes

Money-back guarantee

30 days

Established in 1998, Domain.com is a Florida-based company that serves as both a web hosting provider and domain registrar, boasting 1.2 million websites powered worldwide. Owned by Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group), Domain.com is part of a family of hosting brands including Bluehost, HostGator, and iPage.

What hosting types does Domain.com provide?

Domain.com provides user-friendly and affordable shared hosting plans in several varieties, including WordPress hosting, a website builder an online store builder, and versatile shared hosting plans for various other needs.

Domain.com does not provide VPS hosting, dedicated server hosting, or any other more advanced hosting plans.

Domain.com's hosting plans are suitable for most personal and business sites. However, if your site receives 100,000 visitors a month or more, or if consistent high speeds are crucial, then their shared hosting plans may not be ideal. It's recommended to explore Domain.com promo codes to reduce costs. In the following sections, we'll examine each hosting range, their strengths, and limitations to help you decide if they're right for you.

Domain.com's shared hosting range is straightforward, offering three plans with core features like a free domain, free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, 1-click WordPress installation, and a free website builder. Upgrading provides more resources without additional features to consider. Pricing starts at $3.75 per month on an annual plan, $4.99 on renewal, with no complex discount structure for longer contracts—whether you choose a one, two, or three-year term, the price remains $3.75 per month.

However, during our review, we encountered challenges. Domain.com doesn't utilize popular hosting management platforms like cPanel and Softaculous. Instead, it offers replacements with fewer options and less logical organization, making it difficult to find key functions. The 1-click installer is limited to WordPress, lacking configuration options and management tools, and has had occasional installation failures in the past.

The plans also have some feature limitations, such as the absence of backups in cheaper plans (adding them costs an extra $2.13 per month). Despite getting our site online, we found performance to be below average.

For basic sites with few visitors and a focus on long-term pricing, Domain.com might be acceptable, especially considering its low renewal price of 'from $4.99'. However, the trade-off includes below-average speeds, limited features, and poor management tools.

Comparatively, Hostinger's shared plans start slightly cheaper at $2.99 per month on annual, two, or four-year plans, with higher prices afterward ($6.99 to $8.99). Although backups are still limited on the cheapest plans (weekly rather than daily), Hostinger offers good performance, an excellent control panel and 1-click installer, useful WordPress extras, six data centers, and more.

Domain.com WordPress hosting

WordPress is a highly customizable platform, suitable for anything from personal blogs to large e-commerce sites.

Domain.com's shared hosting allows WordPress installation, adequate for basic exploration. Their WP range offers slight enhancements. The WP Starter plan at $3.75 a month includes unlimited storage and pre-installed themes/plugins, but these may not add significant value. The WP Essential plan at $6.95 a month adds Sitelock malware scanning and dedicated WP support, but similar services can be found elsewhere at a lower cost.

Domain.com also offers WP Live support, priced from $29.95 to $149.95 a month, for design and optimization advice. While potentially useful for beginners, it may not justify the cost compared to other providers offering more comprehensive WordPress plans.

Consider alternatives like Hostinger for budget-friendly WordPress plans with useful extras, Bluehost for a wider range of plans including business features, or IONOS for a variety of WordPress options from inexpensive to powerful.

Does Domain.com offer a website building tool?

If you're aiming for a quick and easy way to establish an online presence, a website builder is often the best option. Most builders can set up initial sites in minutes and allow for easy drag-and-drop addition of elements like text, images, videos, and forms.

Domain.com offers three website builder plans, starting from $1.99 per month (billed monthly) for a basic package supporting up to six pages, up to a $12.99 per month ecommerce plan with advanced features like product listings, inventory tracking, integrated shipping, and order and tax management.

The builder is user-friendly, requiring you to answer a few questions about yourself, your site, and its objectives to create a starter site instantly. All plans include free SSL, unlimited storage, social media sharing, blogs, contact forms, and easy integration with an existing Facebook page.

While Domain.com's plans are reasonably priced, the lack of VPS or dedicated support could be limiting for more complex projects like web stores. If your site outgrows Domain.com's basic shared hosting, you may need to migrate to another provider.

Wix offers a feature-rich website builder with a wide range of plans, including a free option. Squarespace provides professional templates and business and e-commerce plans. For value, Bluehost has plans starting at $2.95 per month, and Zyro, powered by Hostinger, offers an 'e-commerce essentials' plan starting at $3.99 per month.

How fast is Domain.com? 

Website reliability is crucial for maintaining a positive online presence. If your site frequently experiences issues or downtime, it can damage your reputation and drive users away.

To assess reliability, we used Uptime.com to monitor a test site every five minutes over a two-week period. While we expect hosts to achieve 100% uptime in such a short test, Domain.com only managed 99.11%. This places it last in our recent tests, as 11 other hosts achieved 100% uptime, and even the second-to-last host achieved 99.63%.

Uptime.com also measures the response time of each web server tested. Domain.com had the slowest average response time, at 2.97 seconds, whereas nine of the last 15 hosts averaged less than 0.5 seconds.

We evaluate hosting performance using GTmetrix to measure the time it takes to load the main content of a page on a test WordPress site, known as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). A lower LCP indicates a faster and more responsive site, leading to a better user experience.

Domain.com's LCP of 1.5 seconds was relatively disappointing compared to providers like Bluehost (0.8 seconds), GoDaddy (0.7 seconds), and Hostinger (0.6 seconds). While 1.5 seconds is still acceptable, it's important to note that this is based on launching our simple template site. If your site has more content or features, it could be much slower.

Lastly, we utilize k6 to assess website performance under heavy visitor loads. Our Domain.com site managed an average of 22.67 requests per second, but this came at a cost. As the site load increased, response times became longer and more erratic, resulting in an overall test response time of 1.591 seconds. Compared to other providers, most of whom were at least a second faster, Hostinger, HostGator, InMotion Hosting, and Bluehost achieved response times of around 100ms or less.

How user-friendly is Domain.com?

Purchasing a plan from Domain.com is simpler than usual, with only a few plans displayed, each showing the essential features and clear pricing without misleading discounts. However, managing your plan may be less straightforward. Domain.com uses its own custom control panels instead of standard tools like cPanel or Softaculous. These panels are relatively basic and have fewer features, making them less intuitive and organized. For a more straightforward hosting experience, consider a host that offers tools like cPanel or Softaculous. Alternatively, some hosts, like Hostinger, offer their own capable control panels, such as hPanel, available in their budget shared hosting range starting from $1.99 a month.

How is Domain.com's support quality?

Domain.com provides 24/7 live chat support and a comprehensive web knowledgebase. However, there is no ticket support, and phone support is no longer available. This can be inconvenient for long-term issues, as you'll need to re-explain the problem each time you chat with an agent.

The knowledgebase offers a wealth of helpful articles, though some seem to be copied from iPage, another Newfold Digital-owned company, as evidenced by the use of 'iPage.com' references instead of 'Domain.com.' Despite this, since both hosts use the same technology, the articles should still be relevant.

During our tests, live chat responses were consistently quick, with an agent typically responding within a minute. Initial responses seemed automated and similar for each query, but we generally received a more personalized response within three to four minutes.

Agent responses varied in quality depending on the complexity of the issue. For common problems, agents quickly identified and addressed the issue, but they struggled more with complex or unusual problems, such as installing WordPress on a subdomain.

In conclusion, Domain.com's competitive long-term pricing may be attractive for budget-conscious users with simple website needs. However, for more serious projects requiring better performance and reliability, there are more powerful hosting options available for a slightly higher cost.