They’re cheap, but what about their performance?
What is iPage?
iPage was established in 1998 in Boston, MA and has grown into one of the most successful economical web hosting companies. Offering domain registrations, shared, VPS and dedicated hosting, their platform is powering over one million websites.
Pros of iPage Hosting
1. Cheap, Inexpensive Hosting
iPage Hosting comes in at only $1.99 per month , making it one of the cheapest web hosts available in the marketplace.
The great news, is that not only does this rate apply to their long-term deals (like 36 months), but also their shorter, minimum one of 12 months too.
2. The iPage Support
Live 24/7 Chat Support
The customer service team was always quick to answer any and all questions, and when there was a minor hiccup with the service (completely my own fault), their techs were on hand to give me the kind of step by step instruction that had me back up and better than ever.
Just like with other web hosts, chat support will look into your issue. However, with anything complicated, you will have to wait for email support to take care of it.
Based on my experience, second line support does its job usually within 24 hours. In the case of server outages, you won’t have to wait that long though.
3. 100% Uptime in the Last 30 Days
You can see the uptime chart below. For 30 days 100% is a great score! The level they aim at is 99.99%. I remember a downtime about two months ago. That lasted for one minute.
4. 24×7 Uptime Monitoring
Support is cool, but what’s even cooler is not having to contact support the first place. That’s why network uptime is monitored 24/7. If anything goes bad, support can react immediately.
5. Enhanced Security Options
All iPage Hosting plans come with a SiteLock security suite, which is like a security frontline for your site.
Apparently, iPage and SiteLock did a user study and found that 12%+ of subscriber sites contained malware at some point in 2014.
SiteLock helps prevent unwanted security breaches by regularly scanning for malware issues. Depending on the plan you choose, this also includes them going in and removing the malicious stuff for you.
In addition, they’ll use a firewall to help prevent any potential security leaks. For example, running a site with outdated plugins makes you an easy target, as updates regularly reveal where holes or breaches exist in past versions.
Best of all, they’ll also include daily backups. So IF something were to happy, you can simply roll back to a prior version ASAP to get things back online.
This is a nice added bonus that many other web hosts will charge additionally for, making that super low $1.99 look even better yet.
Cons of iPage Hosting
iPage’s pricing is virtually unbeatable. Their customer support is pretty good too!
Unfortunately, their other performance statistics don’t fair as well. Let’s take a look.
1. Loading Time Could be Better
If their uptime wasn’t bad enough, prepare to be amazed.
iPage’s page loading times came in at 821ms, making it only about 8% faster than competition’s average (890ms).
That’s almost absurdly bad, especially when some of the best web hosts we’ve reviewed regularly deliver page loading speeds of under 500ms.
2. Expensive Renewal Costs
iPage advertises (and delivers) low ‘promotional pricing’ for plans of 12-36 months. They’re honest and transparent about those rates, which is great!
But…
What happens when that plan period ends? Unfortunately, our investigation revealed that your costs will jump on up more than $8.99 when it’s time to renew.
3. Expensive Domain Names
Good news. iPage will throw in a new domain name with a 30-day money back guarantee for new account signups.
Only issue?
If you DO ask for your money back during that thirty-day window, they’ll deduct a $15 fee for the domain name (even though those typically cost under $10 in most cases).
4. No cPanel
Almost every single web host will let you use cPanel.
But not iPage. Instead, they go with lesser known cPanel alternative vDeck
What’s good about iPage Hosting?
- Strong uptime – 99.97%
- Very affordable hosting
- Excellent customer support
- Top-notch security options
- Supports third-party applications
- Pricing is honest, upfront, and cheap
- 30-day money back guarantee
- iPage is a green web host
- What’s bad about iPage Hosting?
- Poor page loading speeds
- Costly renewals
- Pricey domain names
- No cPanel
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