iPage hosting is next on our hosting review checklist, and with over 1 million customers it is certainly one of the largest hosting companies out there.
For a small history lesson, iPage is a company that was recently relaunched (in 2009) under the guidance of EIG, or Endurance International Group, a company that many have dubbed the “Evil Corp” of the hosting industry.
We didn’t want to review iPage under the blanket assumption that they are just another EIG clone. Therefore, we took an unbiased approach to our analysis, resulting in quite a pleasant experience. We have also mentioned EIG in our Hostgator and Bluehost reviews, but our experiences have been positive with these hosting companies, regardless of any supposed bad rep from their EIG affiliation.
So let’s take a look at iPage, and if it might be right for your hosting needs! Read more after the break.
iPage Plans / Pricing
iPage offers a somewhat unique pricing model, where they only offer 1 shared hosting package, dubbed “iPage Essential Hosting”. They also offer VPS and Dedicated Hosting as well for more comprehensive and high-traffic websites, although their prices to tend to be a little bit on the higher side when compared to other big hosting companies.
Unlimited disk space and e-mail addresses come standard for the Essential Hosting Plan, which for $1.99 a month is excellent value. Bandwidth is also defined by iPage as “scaled” (they stop short of advertising unlimited bandwidth) meaning if you have a massive amount of traffic coming to your website they might “recommend” you switch to a VPS package.
VPS servers are available for those looking for more control over their website, with plans starting at $25 a month for 1 TB bandwidth. Not necessarily the cheapest out there, but iPage does offer a free domain name and marketing credits with all VPS plans.
If you have an e-commerce site or are just expecting some high traffic on your website, dedicated servers are also part of iPage’s offerings starting at $150.00 a month. iPage’s dedicated servers are scalable based on your needs, which is important for those who might be dealing with more dynamic content on their site.
iPage also tries to test the blogging scene by offering WordPress hosting starting at a relatively low $3.75 a month for their “Starter” plan. Keep in mind that this is just the introductory rate, as the renewal rate for the same WordPress Starter plan is a whopping $9.49 a month.
Once again, keep in mind that iPage’s introductory rates are vastly different after your first term expires, meaning the same $1.99 a month Essential Hosting plan is $12.95 a month (!) when you renew.
iPage Customer Service
Customer service is one of the most critical components of any successful hosting company. The difference between getting quick and efficient support for your website and waiting for hours can mean hundreds or thousands of dollars lost.
iPage has 24/7 customer service with added chat support, a feature we enjoyed since we got a ~two-minute response (our expected wait time was 15 minutes!) while testing their chat response times.
We will mention that iPage has received some pretty concerning feedback on the internet, although these also have to be considered as subjective information that anyone can post at any time. We did not have a negative experience with our customer service test (live chat and telephone), even receiving a follow-up email to our closed ticket days after our request.
Unfortunately, instead of a direct answer to the question we asked during our live chat session, we received a generic link to an FAQ page. Slightly disappointing answer as we try to look at a customer service rep’s knowledge and ability to reply to questions as well as response times.
iPage Reliability / Speed
iPage as a reputation for being one of the most reliable and high-preforming hosting providers out there. Through a combination of their custom network infrastructure and a team dedicated to giving customer’s the best possible experience, we believe that iPage does deserve their ranking as one of the best providers.
With a 99.87% “lifetime” uptime according to Cloud Spectator, iPage has an excellent track record in this sense, albeit slightly behind some of the other big hosting providers such as Bluehost and 1&1.
iPage hosts their servers in two data centers, located in Boston, MA. Both facilities are highly secure facilities, and numerous backups and fail-safes are in place, but all customer data is also mirrored across various cloud servers in case of any interruption of service.
As far as page load times go, we’ve mentioned that the industry standard is around three seconds, which is usually the average duration a potential visitor will wait for your website to load before trying an alternative. An additional paid service that is provided is Dynamic Site Accelerator, a tool similar to CloudFlare CDN that is highly useful for websites dealing with a lot of traffic.
iPage Security
One of the most critical components of a web hosting provider are the security measures taken to safeguard their customer’s data. Luckily, iPage has state of the art security measures in place with their multi-tiered network architecture, continuous power supplies and BGP-4 smart routing technology on their routers.
Additional security features for iPage include Sitelock for as little as $1.94 a month providing an extra layer of security for your website. SSL certificates are also available for high-traffic and e-commerce sites for around $1.60 a month.
We found one notable instance of a major security breach with iPage occurring in April of 2013 which coincided with a “brute force attack” on a large number of WordPress sites across the Internet. According to iPage’s blog they dealt with the problem in unique fashion, first blocking access to all WordPress sites and following up with their custom solution to the attack. We must tip our hats to their reaction time and innovative thinking that solved a crisis that befuddled webmasters and hosting providers alike for many days.
iPage Interface
iPage has their custom control panel based on vDeck, being conveniently built for those who may not have an expert understanding on the intricacies of hosting a website. vDeck is simple to understand and provides a very user-friendly control panel experience.
As you can see in the below image, the control panel is very sleek and clutter-free, something that comes as a relief after experiencing some other hosting providers interfaces. You can easily access e-mail, manage your site’s add ons and handle any billing or support questions in what seems like record time.
An additional feature that we liked about iPage is the fact that they offer eco-friendly hosting solutions. They advertise their servers as being 100% wind-powered, meaning they are not only environmentally conscious but can also offer lower long-term prices as a result.
iPage Hosting Conclusion
While EIG’s acquisition certainly casts an ominous shadow over iPage, we’ve come to the conclusion that they have stayed away from some of the problems associated with other EIG-owned hosting companies (typically poor customer service and unstable servers).
With a 30-day money back guarantee, give iPage a try at no risk and let us know your thoughts!
We liked
- Excellent live chat support
- vDeck control panel
- Very low introductory rates
We weren’t so sure about
- Renewal pricing
- Lack of options for shared hosting
We hated
- EIG acquisition
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