"cheap and cheerful"
There's your problem, right there.
Hundreds of thousands of websites have been hit by an unexplained outage at DNS services provider ZoneEdit, with users seeing five full days of downtime. While the 600,000 customer domains ZoneEdit looks after were all apparently still resolving during the outage, users were been able to log into their accounts to make updates …
They have no credible service status page. Their uptime and their customer service was lacking, hence moved from their service some time ago. Still got credits there though...
re "you get what you pay for" & "cheap and cheerful": unless you have their company accounts I do not think you can say that, since extrapolating their income vs estimated costs I would imagine they have plenty of cash to pay for support services. I suspect dotster just milk it since buying it.