iPage Hosting Reviews – Pros and Cons

iPage Hosting Review – With one glance you will know that iPage is the cheapest in the market.  Presently this hosting service belongs to the Endurance International Group, which also owns, Just Host, PowWeb, EasyCGI, Bluehost, VSP Link and more.  We all know that Endurance is BBB A+ certified.  So how good is iPage?  Read on to know our views….

About iPage

Established in 1998 by Thomas Gorny, iPage has six office locations globally. They have more than one million happy customers across the world.  They have maintained their website rankings among the top 10 web hosting sites ever since their inception 2 decades ago.

• Features
• Free domain
• Unlimited disk space and email ids
• Security suite free
• Free site building tools lie Weebly, WordPress
• 30 day money-back guarantee
• Daily backups
• Wind energy powered

Some hosting plans of iPage

1. Shared Hosting

There is one shared hosting plan under this section called Essential Plan which costs you $1.99 per month. You can also purchase and install WordPress by just one click.

This package includes unlimited storage, domain names, MySQL databases, bandwidth, apps and Wix.

2. WordPress Hosting

iPage has two plans under this head.

1. WP Starter costs you $3.75 per month. It has preinstalled themes, a personalized control panel and few functional plugins.
2. WP Essential costs $6.95 per month. It has additional features like SSD based infrastructure for improvement in speed.

3. VPS Holding for big businesses

There are three types of plans under this head (VPS Hosting) – Basic, Business and Optimum.

4. Dedicated hosting

The three plans under this head are Start-up, Professional and Enterprise.

The features of iPage Dedicated Server above plus experience plus customer support can make iPage a very good hosting option for large businesses and customers. iPage are partners of Unsplash and this gives you a chance to explore their large album of high resolution photos.

They also provision for implementing SEO and aiding Google Search Engine index your website.   They are now focusing on personal stores, e- commerce establishments and non-profit organizations.

But there are a few drawbacks.  The plus and minus points of iPage are discussed below…

Pros

1. Cheapest

iPage is the cheapest hosting package around….. as cheap as $1.99 per month.   Their prices are half the rates of the price other hosting service providers. This policy is available for both short term and long term plans.  So you are not cheated into paying double when you go for short term or long term plan.

2. Uptime as high as 99.98%

The Uptime of iPage is among the highest averaging at 99.98%. This percentage is better than the industry average at 0.4% which means your website is up most of the time and you will not face hassles in event like sales promotions.

The Uptime stats of some previous months are as follows:

2017(Average Uptime):

• October -100%
• November – 99.96%
• December – 100%

2018(Average Uptime):

• January 99.98%
• February – 99.97%
• March – 99.98%

3. Support

They have a good customer service support system through live chat, phone and email communication channels.  The customer supports are well-trained and helpful in answering our queries.

4. Security

They are also in partnership with SiteLock which protects takes care of security of your data and lets you sleep in peace. SiteLock takes care of malware issues based on the plan you choose.

Constant updates by way of firewalls helps retaliate to the newest threats that your data may face.

Daily backups keep your data intact and in case of any problem you can fall back on this data.

5. 30-day Money Back Guarantee

While most hosts provide 30-day Money Back guarantee, the money-back is done only on the basis of certain terms and conditions. iPage however refunds your money on dissatisfaction without asking laying conditions or asking any questions.

6. Supports for E-commerce

iPage supports PayPal, Google Apps and other e-commerce applications that are specifically helpful for your e-commerce transactions while securing payment transactions.

You also get bonus credits for Google AdWords, Bing and Yahoo.

7. They are Environment friendly

iPage data centers and severs are powered by wind energy, as they are an EPA Green Power Partner.  They hold Renewable Energy Certificates that equals planting 244 acres of trees and removing an equal number of cars off the roads.

So using the package is makes you a major contributor for the environment cause

Cons:

1. Slow loading time

One of the drawbacks on using iPage is its loading time.  The average loading time 868ms.  This could affect your site traffic.  Firstly, you will visibility, next your rankings may tank.

Generally visitors wait for just under 3 second for a website to load.  In case the time taken is more at least 50% visitors just leave.  This will have drastic affect on your business.

2. Works on vDeck

vDeck panel is sophisticated and not as user- friendly and up-to-date as cPanel.  This is a big deterrent for non-technical users who will need help whenever they access the panel.

3. Renewal costs

iPage’s first package plan for 12 -36 months is low, affordable and great as compared to other hosts.  But, when the time comes for renewal, the story becomes different.

The renewal cost is 350% more for all categories of hosting plans.  So, this is the biggest drawback of iPage hosting service

4. Domain names are not free if you cancel service

Say, you have opted for the 30 day Money back trial with a new domain name.  In case you are not satisfied, you will surely get back your money. But, it will be lesser by $15, a fee for the domain name provided by iPage.

This will hit you harder if you know that other hosts deduct only $10 for the domain name.

5. Unlimited hosting is a mirage at iPage

Though the advertisements of iPage carry the tag unlimited hosting, User Agreement puts certain limitation to unlimited hosting.

• Unlimited is limited to the capacity of CPU resources
• If your accounts have an excess of over 200,000 inodes you will be asked to reduce size else you will be suspended
• This is also the case if the number of your MySQL/PostgreSQL tables exceed 1000

To sum up, iPage has excellent Up-times, good customer support, top-notch security options, cheap pricing slabs, 30-day money-back guarantee and highly functional app integrations.  But they their loading speed is slow, renewals costlier and their panels are not as user-friendly as other hosts.