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CleverDot Review 2024 – What Do Users Say?

Hendrik Human Written by: Hendrik Human

For straightforward shared hosting with generous limits, CleverDot seems like a smart choice with packages that can cater to the needs of most individuals and small businesses.

We hosted the same WordPress website on the most popular web hosting platforms and measured their performance
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Overview

CleverDot was established in 2002 and has been providing shared hosting and domain registration services since their inception. They’ve remained a smaller company that’s comfortable operating at their current scale. Currently, they provide hosting to U.S. and Canadian customers only. They’ve labelled themselves “the clever choice” because of their affordable and simple packages and their clever use of software.

CleverDot11

Features and Ease of Use

Despite being a smaller hosting provider with a limited set of services, CleverDot still provides all the fundamentals such as:

  • Domain registration
  • SSL certificates
  • Manual backup manager
  • Antivirus protection
  • Unlimited email accounts and forwarders
  • MySQL databases
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • cPanel installation

They also provide a few other features that add a lot of value and utility to their web hosting plans:

  • RVSiteBuilder: This is a popular tool for beginners to easily build a website. It includes a decent number of templates and a drag-and-drop interface.
  • Softaculous: Softaculous is the most comprehensive script installer with dozens of hosting apps ready for installation at the click of your mouse.
  • Search Engine Submission Tool: This makes sure that your website gets indexed by Google and other search engines as soon as possible.

CleverDot has put a bit of effort into making their platform easy to use. Their pricing is simple, the signup process is almost effortless, and they provide a great range of software to help even the most novice users set up polished-looking websites.

However, your account will only be activated within an hour upon making payment: I found this a bit slow considering most shared hosting providers activate accounts almost instantly. Plus, their website looks very dated. This is probably where CleverDot falls short of their bigger and operationally-stronger competitors, and may also indicate that their platform may not be the most convenient.

Pricing and Support

CleverDot only offers three shared hosting plans. However, the terms are very generous with no setup fees, an exceptional 60-day money back guarantee, and a choice of monthly or discounted yearly billing. You can also get a discount if you choose to register a domain name with your yearly plan.

The plans come with:

  • Starter: 25 GB storage, 250 GB bandwidth, 25 databases, and support for a single website.
  • Advanced: 50 GB storage, 1 TB bandwidth, unlimited databases, and up to ten websites.
  • Pro: Everything is unlimited.

Although not the absolute cheapest, CleverDot’s packages are still in the more affordable range. The software and features you get with your hosting service also makes it pretty good value for money.

CleverDot only offers technical support through email; their phone line is for billing or order queries only. It seems like they offer a live chat, but every time I tried to access it, they were offline. However, in my experience, their support team responded promptly and was generally competent and helpful, even though it took multiple emails to resolve the issues. Unfortunately, their knowledge base has minimal help documentation, and they don’t regularly update their social media channels.

Comparison

How does CleverDot match up to the competition?

1HostingerCompareOur Score4.9Compare
1IONOSCompareOur Score4.8Compare
1CleverDotCompareOur Score4.2Compare
1Go4HostingCompareOur Score2.4Compare

CleverDot REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

If you only need a simple and cheap shared hosting service with beginner-friendly software, then CleverDot may be a good fit for you. Their unlimited plan makes it possible to have a stress-free solution. However, don’t expect the same support or features as larger providers.

CleverDot might offer a good service at a reasonable price, but does it match up with the top web hosting companies? We find it hard to say “yes.”

Pros

  • Simple and affordable pricing
  • Great selection of free software
  • Free SSL; discounted domains available
  • Unlimited plan

Cons

  • Very limited support
  • Only shared hosting; little scalability
Hendrik Human Hendrik Human
Hi, I’m Hendrik, your web guru. The only two things you need to know about me are: I love making websites, and I love to write about how to do it. That’s why I’m here – to help make it fun and easy for you too.
4.5
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Long time satisfied customer

I have been using cleverdot for hosting several personal sites for a long time - since like 2007 or something (I can't remember). They have a flawless implementation of cPanel. Their hosting is fairly reliable, but there is an occasional outage. They don't seem to have a lot of redundancy in their hosting platforms, so when one goes down, well, that's about it. On the other hand, their response to my support questions have always been prompt and careful.

avatar
Elliott M, USA
July 10, 2020
4
I like them

It all worked well, I used them for about 4 years and they had all kinds of good features like forum setup, cPanel, and always got back to me in 24 hrs from email support. I am looking to use them again.

1 avatar
guest, USA
December 16, 2018
5
Family sharingMulti User SharingExpert SupportBackupSmart syncPersonal SolutionBusiness SolutionTeams optionsOffline foldersFile history and recovery
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