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Discount Domains Review 2024 – Is It Underrated?

Mark Holden Written by: Mark Holden

Discount Domains is a New Zealand-based domain registrar and a trusted web hosting service that provides affordable hosting packages and a number of add-ons, in addition to professional support and 24/7 monitoring.

We hosted the same WordPress website on the most popular web hosting platforms and measured their performance
Click here to see our results >>

Overview

discountdomains main

Founded in 2003, Discount Domains provides premium web hosting, email hosting, domain registration services, and SEO to over 13,000 clients. Their servers are located in New Zealand.

Features and Ease of Use

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Discount Domains gives you everything you need to create your website or blog and even manage your emails and databases. Here is a rundown of their features:

  • Plesk control panel
  • Domain registration
  • Softaculous app installer
  • Horde email accounts
  • Online file manager
  • Backup and restore
  • DNS settings
  • PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript
  • Let’s Encrypt SSL
  • FTP access

With Discount Domains’ web builder, even newbies can easily build a website or blog. Their drag-and-drop interface allows you to create a complete website in minutes. You have the option to choose from hundreds of responsive and customizable themes. These themes come with built-in e-commerce features, enabling you to sell products and accept payments on your online store. Once you create pages, you can easily embed photos and videos and integrate a free shopping cart into your e-commerce website.

Every hosting account comes with the innovative Plesk control panel, a user-friendly hosting platform for developers, techies, and agencies. It comes with a dashboard that lets you build and manage multiple websites, monitor performance, and run updates. Designed with flexibility and control in mind, their Plesk-powered hosting also lets you install third-party and open sources apps. You can easily extend the features and tools of your control panel by integrating over 100+ extensions.

Pricing and Support

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I find it grossly misleading, if not untruthful, for Discount Domains to claim their hosting packages are cheap when they’re clearly expensive (including their add-ons) compared to other comparable services. All of their four web hosting plans and add-ons have yearly billing cycles. The one good thing worth mentioning with regards to their pricing is that they don’t charge any setup fees. If you’d like to upgrade, you can do so quickly and easily too from their user-friendly customer portal. There’s no need to call support as provisioning is instant.

Locally-owned and operated, Discount Domains leverages the talents of trustworthy Kiwi professionals in every area of hosting. They have Linux admins, computer technicians, and network engineers who can assist you with a myriad of issues. Call their telephone support line between 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m on Monday-Friday, open a ticket, or use their online contact form; they’ll help you promptly. If you’re a hands-on person like me, you’ll appreciate being able to check their FAQs and knowledge base for answers to simple hosting issues.

Comparison

How does Discount Domains match up to the competition?

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

Discount Domains REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

Whether you want to register a domain or set up a website in New Zealand, Discount Domains can help you get your personal blog or small business websites up and running in no time.

Still not sure if this is the right web host for you? Check out our top recommended web hosts to learn more.

Pros

  • User-friendly control panel
  • True local support team
  • Stable and reliable hosting
  • Fast provisioning and upgrades

Cons

  • No mention of uptime
  • Add-ons are quite expensive

FAQ

Does it matter where you host your website?

You’ll get better performance from your website if your hosting provider has a data center near your target market. So if you’re hosting a site in New Zealand for an audience in the region, Discount Domains is a solid choice.

You can also find discounts on our coupons page for many competing hosting providers in NZ. 

Which is the best host for New Zealand?

Hostinger is our pick as the top web host for New Zealand. Plans are cheap, and provide a great combination of performance and features. Discount Domains is relatively pricey, and doesn’t give you as much for your money as Hostinger or our other top 8 web hosts for New Zealand in 2024.

Do all Discount Domains plans include a free domain?

You don’t get a free domain with Discount Domains’ entry-level plan, but you do with its higher-priced plans. If you need an entry-level plan and want a free domain, one or two of our 10 best web hosts for 2024 offer them, but you’ll probably find the prices are low enough that you can afford a domain registration fee after all. 

Does Discount Domains have cPanel?

No. Despite offering Linux-based web hosting, Discount Domains gives you Plesk instead of cPanel. But Plesk is a solid control panel. Check out our Plesk vs cPanel comparison for more.
Mark Holden Mark Holden
Mark is a full stack web developer specializing in HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP. When he’s not busy building websites or geeking out over the latest addition to his ever-growing gadget collection, he enjoys playing drums for his progressive rock band. He can also make a mean Spanish omelet.
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Servers down – No correspondence, no updates, nothing… 1.5 hours wait time for support

29/09/23 Issue with their 3 primary servers for the customer portal & Nameserver services. Understandably, things like this happen. However, we received no information about the outage & instead had to hear from our outraged customers!

1 avatar
Andy, New Zealand
September 28, 2023
1
Would give no stars if I could

Have had trouble with invoicing every year. They double / triple invoicing for the same domain name. When contacting them they are rude & unhelpful (call Centre based Philippines) They suspended our website without warning after fixing the issue they caused yesterday. Do not use!

1 avatar
Gayle Creswick, Australia
May 31, 2022
1
Bad bad service

They "accidentally" took our website down, customer service located in the Philippines was hopeless. It took more than 10 weeks for them to work out what they had done because they baulked for 8 weeks saying that we were the ones to take the website down and then by the time they owned up to it the website was unretrievable. We got our years subscription refunded.

1 avatar
Bron, New Zealand
February 28, 2022
1
Really really bad

Don't trust these guys. I lost a dot.com because of their billing notification. They charged me 3 years for domain names but they actually triple charged me for one year. A spent two weeks trying to get my money back despite the invoices clearly saying the billing period was for one year. The latest debacle with these guys: a receipt of a paid invoice says I used a crypto currency to pay but it was only a cc transaction. Plus - I cancelled an auto renew but mysteriously it was re-enabled so I got charged AND I got charged 24 days before the billing period. Seriously wtf. Not be be trusted. Customer service is terrible.

1 avatar
Matt, Australia
January 06, 2022
1
Agree with all the reviews here

Yes Discount Domains Customer service is appalling. They charged an additional year, apologized for it & said it would be refunded then went back on their word. Emails to & fro wasting time then they had the audacity to say “as a courtesy, they will refund as per the Terms & Conds. Would change companies if it was easy. Very poor service.

1 avatar
Disgruntled customer, Australia
June 08, 2021
1
Avoid – Terrible service

Failed to inform me about domain expiry. Charged me extra fees for renewal but refused to refund those upon request. Provided me emails logs proving they had failed to contact me as per their own T&Cs. Blamed me for not updating my contact details, when they have literally not changed in 10 years - they lost them in a system migration (yet my login is literally my email address and they still couldn't find it). Refuse point blank to consider any refund or rectifying action. Escalation met with the same "No" response, without ever demonstrating they had actually done their job properly.

1 avatar
Phil Murphy, New Zealand
March 03, 2021
1
Rubbsih

Was automatically transferred from Umbrellar who were great to deal with to Discount Domains. Absolute rubbish company. Cut my business site without any contact, poor website and poor customer service. Do not recommend and looking for NZ based alternatives.

1 avatar
Anon, New Zealand
January 04, 2021
1
Terrible Service, Terrible Product

We have used discount domains for three years now and they are worse every year we stay with them, Year 1 they worked as described, year 2 the server looked to be down for upgrades every few months and no emails received in that time it was down, year 3 they have their server down at least every month without warning and we only find out when no emails received, when calling support you either cant get through or they tell you they are working on it. Could deal with it OK if it wasn't every month. Will be switching because of these issues.

1 avatar
anonymus, New Zealand
December 13, 2020
1
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