iPage Web Hosting Review

iPage, a well-known shared hosting provider, has been on the market for quite a while now, offering a unique focus on cheap web hosting with massive amounts of feature sets. On top of that, iPage also boasts 24/7 technical assistance to help you with any and all problems your website may encounter.

The word we’d use to describe iPage is “solid”. With over 1.5M domain names under management, iPage offers a great deal of flexibility, without overcomplicating things. With iPage you can be proud that the web servers hosting your website and e-mails are eco-friendly since all of their servers are powered by 100% wind energy!

iPage and EIG: A Little Background Story

In case you are not aware, iPage is owned and managed by a group of experienced management team – the Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG has been around for more than 15 years and their hosting platform is currently holding more than 2 million domain names. The group also owns some of the biggest names in web hosting industry, including FatCow, BlueHost, HostMonster, JustHost, PowWeb, EasyCGI, StartLogic, Dot5 Hosting, VPS Link, and so on. I am not very sure on the exact numbers but I believe EIG is now the biggest web hosting/domain company on earth.

Anyway, this is just background story that does not matter that much.

iPage Review:

As web hosting shoppers and users, who owns the company is not our main concern. What’s more important are: What iPage has to offer? And, is iPage the right hosting for you?

We are going to find out the answers in this iPage review.

But first – special discount!

iPage Hosting Special Discount (Save 83%)

Get iPage hosting in just $1.99/mo instead of $11.95/mo through this exclusive discount link.

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If you are looking for a really cheap web host, now is the best time – so hurry before this offer window ends (see below to find out why iPage is my #1 budget hosting choice).

For best accuracy in price and hosting features, please refer to iPage official website.

What Makes IPage Better Than The Rest?

There are couple of different factors that make iPage one of the best budget hosting in the market.

One key factor that beats all other shared hosting companies is: Price.

iPage = Cheapest Hosting Service

Most budget shared hosting providers actually offer more or less the same hosting features (unlimited hosting, free domain name, webmail, 24×7 supports, etc etc) and quality of service (North American based supports, 99% server uptime, etc etc).

As we are getting the same hosting features eventually, the cheaper the deal the better (provide that the host comes with reliable server uptime and satisfying customer service), right?

You bet! This is why I think iPage is awesome. iPage hosting offers what most other shared hosting providers offer (in term of both quality and features), but it is 76% to 450% cheaper than the others. For easy reference, here’s the comparison chart. Notice how much money you get to save with iPage.

Price Comparison: iPage vs Other Hosting Brands

Web Hosting	Price Starting at	vs. iPage
iPage	$1.99	–
Siteground	$3.95	98% higher
Bluehost	$3.95	98% higher
Web Hosting Hub	$4.99	150% higher
Interserver	$5.00	151% higher
Dreamhost	$5.78	190% higher
InMotion Hosting	$5.99	201% higher

iPage = Best Budget Hosting + one of Woblogger’s Top 10 Picks

Read: Top 10 Web Hosting Companies

IPage Web Hosting: Products and Features

Shared Web Hosting Packages

Shared hosting plan of iPage is iPage Essentials. I am using iPage Essential hosting plan from 2012 and I’m still using IPage Essential plan for Learnwebskills101.

Unlike others, iPage does not offer month-to-month shared Web hosting plans. It actually has a lot in common with HostGator $3.95 at HostGator – Shared in that respect. You can sign up for either a one-year, two-year, or three-year term.

The introductory price is about $1.99 per month and it is for the first term of service only.

Renewals are at the regular rate, which is $12.95 per month for one year, $11.95 per month for two years, and $10.95 per month for three years. The price more than quadruples when it’s time to renew.

iPage’s Essential plan offers unlimited disk space, network bandwidth, domains, email addresses, and MySQL databases. There are not one, but three different site-builder tools, a built-in online store, access to the Mojo Marketplace to get more third-party applications, access to a free cloud storage account, and various advertising and marketing tools. All of this is available with a generous anytime money-back guarantee.

VPS Hosting Packages

iPage also offers VPS hosting, starting at $19.99 per month. If you expect high traffic volumes, or have specific compliance requirements that prevent you from using shared servers, these are good options to consider (especially if you don’t want to pay dedicated Web hosting’s relatively high prices).

iPage offers three configurations for its Linux-based servers: Basic, Business, and Optimum. Basic plans ($19.99 per month) start with just 1GB of RAM, 40GB of storage, and 1TB of monthly data transfers. Business plans offer 4GB of RAM, 90GB of storage, and 3TB of monthly data transfers. The Optimum plan has 8GB of RAM, 120GB of storage, and 4TB of month data transfers.

Dedicated Hosting Packages

iPage’s solid, middle-of-the-road dedicated server plans are starting at $119.99 per month.

You can configure the servers with up to 1TB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and up to 15TB of data transfers per month.

WordPress Hosting Packages

Now, Ipage offers super speed WordPress hosting packages (starting at $3.75 per month) with an SSD-based infrastructure and recently reconfigured servers, WP Essential is designed for maximized site uptime.

IPage have teamed up with the experts of SiteLock to deliver a deluxe security bundle that actively eliminates malware.

My Experience With IPage Web Hosting

My journey with iPage started in the early days when the new management took over and refurbish the company in late 2009. I have purchased iPage twice in the past – one in early 2012 and one in 2013. I still own one of the accounts today and I am hosting two websites on it.

My experience with iPage, in short, is positive.

Good Uptime Record

Furthermore, I am also happy with iPage server performance in term of uptime and server response speed. I know, you might read some complaints on iPage from time to time and wonder why I am rating the web host that good. Well for one, I do not put up illogical expectation – we are paying such a small fees for an iPage hosting account, it’s insane to expect the web host to provide the same kind of service we get at InMotion or Siteground. Secondly, iPage has hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of customers – it is guaranteed that someone will be unhappy about something and went bad mouth on the web host. You just can’t please everyone when you are this big.

IPage Uptime Review – 100% in the Last 30 Days

I have been tracking two iPage-hosted sites for more than two years. At time of writing, the uptime score for the past 30 days (see image) is 100% – which IMO, not bad at all for a budget host selling at less than $5/mo.

The iPage 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.

If you have ever dealt with a hosting service in your life, you probably know that Live Chat is kind of like a first line support. They fix the easy stuff, change settings and point you to the right direction. Now, when there is an issue that requires an advanced set of skills, they will create a support ticket to the second line support and leave you at that.

Based on my experience, second line support does its job usually within 24 hours.

Ad Credits and More

$100 Adwords Voucher! Start advertizing your website instantly! You get $100 Adwords Voucher, $50 Yahoo & Bing Search Credit, $50 Facebook Ad Credit and Free Yellowpages Business Listing.

Free Shopsite! Award winning ShopSite is one of the easiest-to-use shopping cart softwares for small to medium-sized businesses.

WordPress: 1-Click WordPress installation and compatible servers.

Secure your Site with Sitelock – You can find and fix malware issues and keep your site free of errors with Sitelock.

Awesome Control Panel

Let’s get real – not every business owner has the time to dedicate to learning all about how web hosting and online technologies work and integrate. Most people are looking for a quick and dirty solution to getting a fantastic website up and running, making sales and making money – and if you fall into that camp, then you are going to love this little feature from iPage.com.

Under the FTP management panel you can check your FTP details, create, edit and delete FTP users. You can set the default directory location too.

FileManager is jut a simple little tool used to do the same stuff you can do via FTP, but without a client. That’s basically uploading and downloading files. You can create new files from scratch and edit existing ones as you like.

The Free 1 GB Cloud Storage item is just a free offer for all iPage customers for JustCloud. It’s a service by EIG (owner of iPage and a bunch of other companies). I think they want to build something like DropBox. I didn’t try it yet, as I have all my storage needs covered. I might give it a try and post a review here in the future.

The Mojo Marketplace is what the 1-Click Installer is called at iPage. That’s a simplification, because Mojo has more than that. It’s a marketplace connected to the 1-Click Installer. There is a lot of free stuff up there, like themes, plugins, graphics & logos, and all kinds of add-ons. The installer is quite simple, but if you need any help setting something up, Mojo also provides many services in this area.

The one called My Installs (SimpleScripts) is in fact the same thing as the Mojo market. It just shows you what is already installed on your account.

MySQL is an easy way to tap into the power of Structured Query Language. Mojo fully handles creating databases when you use it to install your scripts. But if you are a power user, you can simply edit any field in the database.

I have not tried Shopsite, because I like open-source stuff better. There are numerous open-source alternatives with the same set of features. What speaks for Shopsite is that it’s integrated into iPage. That means that if you have any issue with your shop, support is there for you. The disadvantage? It’s not free and it locks you into your iPage contract. You cannot move your shop to another host, at least not as easily as with an open-source solution.

Visitor Statistics is the old-style statistics all web hosts have. You can choose between Webalizer and AWStats. They are useful if you want to see raw data. It’s completely useless when you want insight into conversion funnels, bounce rates, and the type of statistics that helps a webmaster to craft a better website. For that, you can use Google Analytics, or the open-source alternative Piwik.

Website Creator by CM4All and Weebly Drag and Drop Builder are quite similar. They let you set up simple but cool websites without any technical knowledge. I would personally go for WordPress (because it’s so cool, yeah), but that needs some maintenance and you don’t get support (you do from the community).

IPage Hosting – What’s Good About It?

To summarize, here’s the quick list on what I like and dislike about the iPage hosting.

Extremely Cheap (iPage = Cheapest Shared Hosting!) As mentioned above, if you are searching for the Best Budget Web Hosting, iPage will be surely come into your radar. Fact is, iPage is extremely cheap. And not that only it is cheap; it’s also reputable and reliable. So if you want a good host at an affordable price, iPage hosting is a go!

Anytime Money Back Guarantee Another good thing about iPage is its protective customer policy. Most hosting companies offer money back guarantees for the first 30 to 45 days; but not iPage. All iPage customers are protected by its Anytime Money Back Guarantee. Under this policy, iPage customers get to claim for a pro-rated refund after the first 30 days trial period. In other words, iPage has to work very hard to win business as it is easy for customers to leave the host.

User Friendly And Extremely Smooth Ordering Process iPage is perhaps the most newbie-friendly web host. I have purchased iPage twice in the past and both processes were nothing but pleasure. The account setup process was idiot-proof and the ordering process was very smooth. My hosting accounts were ready minutes after payment.

Eco-Friendly Hosting According to iPage official website, its hosting operation is fully powered by renewable energy. (Unfortunately, I have no proof on this point – I have no idea where does the company purchase its green energy certificates nor how much it purchased in the past.)

IPage Hosting – The Not So Good

Unnecessary Software Offer When you first signup with iPage, you will be “lured” into various free trials. There is a wide list of so-call Marketing Services in iPage control panel including Constant Contact, Email Brain Small Business, Free Toll-Free Phone Number, Free YP.com Listing, Google Webmaster Tools, Y! Sponsored Search Credits, and so on. Please be aware that many of these services are only free during trial period – you will need to pay if once the trial period has ended (I am guessing that iPage earn referral fees in this). Careless users who accidentally activated the trials and forgot to cancel the services within the trial period will need to pay for these services.

Should You Go With IPage Hosting?

Now, what I think about iPage doesn’t matter.

Key question: Is iPage the right web host for you?

Given that there are both pros and cons; negative and positive reviews on the Internet; should you still go with iPage hosting? The decision is yours to be made.

iPage Shared = Best Budget Hosting

iPage is truly the *Best Budget Hosting* in my book – it is not the best web host (for sure!); but it is the best option if you are looking for a cheap hosting solution.

For those who are just starting out and building first website – iPage is the perfect spot to start with – as the cost is extremely low and signup process is very easy. You can’t find any web host offering the same hosting features and server performance at this low price ($1.99/mo). And, as for the negative reviews, well iPage allows customers to cancel their account anytime they want and refund back the remaining fees – so what is there to worry?

For more details or to order iPage hosting, visit: http://www.ipage.com 

Save 83% on iPage Hosting Now!!