IPage is a hosting company founded in 1998 by Thomas Gony. It was later acquired by Endurance International Group in 2010. Statistics show that IPage now hosts over a million websites. Currently it has 6 offices worldwide and 2 data centers in the US.
IPage is an EPA green power partner, which means data centers are powered by wind energy and that reduces their carbon footprints. They provide cost-effective and reliable web hosting with the best lock-in savings with longer term deals.
You can easily find a cost-effective hosting plan with IPage irrespective of the size of your business. Ipage has a great customer care service which is available 24/7 round the year. They are always open for calls, live chat including email.
Since the past 12 months, their uptime has been with an average speed of 99.97%; they have a page load time of about 760ms. The Ipage single-shared hosting plan happens to be one of the best priced at $1.99/month. They also feature two WordPress based plans with other features like SiteLock and automatic malware removal.
IPage offers a free domain name for the first year, and a free SSL certificate. Their default plan comes with unlimited bandwidth and disk space.
Why IPage Could Be a Good Hosting Choice
IPage claims to power over a million websites. They focus more on powering small and middle-scale businesses worldwide. Their main goal is to help growing businesses or carriers gain an online presence.
IPage offers an all in one pack. Domain names can be bought through ipage, or transferred from another host.
Advantages of Using IPage
IPage is not too expensive for the first three years; they have an uptime above average, and a friendly customer support.
Cost-Effective Hosting
Over the past 3 years, IPage has always been on the list of the cheapest web hosts, with a great number of reviews. IPage offers big discounts, most especially to new customers. Their current hosting plan starts at $1.99/month.
There is not much pressure on customers; ipage has only one shared hosting plan. Cool! But the catch is that customers will have to make a three years upfront payment for the $1.99/month price.
They offer $400+ in freebies. After signup, the customer gets $200 credits for advertising. Customers can also subscribe to the SiteLock add-on at the rate of $1.99/month without leaving a hole in the pocket.
Loads of Third Party Applications
All IPage hosting plans come with a one-year free domain name registration. And the customer saves $14/year afterwards.
Users also get free email accounts and free SSL certificates. Each free email is fully branded for the user’s domain name (domain specific email address). This includes spam filters, auto responder, email forwarding, virus checking and POP3/IMAP accounts.
IPage hosting plans come with unlimited disk space and unlimited mySQL database. IPage offers an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website builder feature that comes with six pages and hundreds of templates.
IPage offers several popular open-source apps for free installation. It includes content management systems and software like joomla, Drupal, B2evolution, Gallery2, WordPress, and zenphoto galleries, including phpBB.
IPage also has tools to build e-commerce stores that include: Open Cart, Prestashop, Agoracart, Zen Cart and Tomato Cart. Free PayPal integration is also available for new webmasters.
Friendly Customer Support
IPage has a friendly customer service that is offered through an online help desk and ticketing system. They also offer free self-help tutorials for those who may want to quickly fix issues themselves.
They provide Support in 3 modes: 24/7 phone, email ticketing system and live chat.
Easy to Use
IPage offers its customers’ hosting packages that come with an easy-to-use website builder with a drag-and-drop menu option, including WordPress installer. Users can create a professional, mobile-friendly site the way they want in no time flat with the website builder. Users also get SEO tools, online store integration, and many more.
IPage does not offer cPanel. Unlike most hosting companies, they offer their own customized version of a control panel which they refer to as vDeck. However, if you’re used to cPanel already, you may find it slightly difficult. Account management is incredibly easy with vDeck. However, there’s no big difference between vDeck and cPanel.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
IPage offers its users a 30-day refund with guarantee. They’ll gladly give your hosting money back if you simply let them know within the first month that you’re not happy about their services.
However, payments for domain names and extra paid services are usually not refundable. Just like other hosting providers, if you ask for a refund, a $15 fee to cover the cost of the domain name will be deducted. So, the good news is that you will still own the domain name and can move it or ‘point’ the domain to another hosting company somewhere else.
Performance and Uptime
IPage is loaded with a lot of features. However, all the features mentioned in this review are really worth nothing except that your site is reliably online and accessible by your visitors.
In a quest to rule out any one-time problems, we use a long period of 24 months performance tests to track uptime and their performance.
Without bias, we can compare these uptime and performance results against other hosting service providers to show you exactly how one host is better than another.
Fortunately, over this time period, iPage has delivered a 99.97% uptime average. That’s well more than the industry average; it’s good enough to comfortably place it at the top bracket of hosts we’ve reviewed.
This average could have been even higher, but during the 24-month tracking period, there were some months where iPage struggled with uptime, and this brought down the average a bit.
The uptime average for the period (December 2018 – November 2019:
- December 2018 average uptime: 100%
- January 2019 average uptime: 99.96%
- February 2019 average uptime: 99.92
- March 2019 average uptime: 99.95%
- April 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
- May 2019 average uptime: 99.95%
- June 2019 average uptime: 99.90%
- July 2019 average uptime: 99.90%
- August 2019 average uptime: 99.96%
- September 2019 average uptime: 100%
- October 2019 average uptime: 99.97%
- November 2019 average uptime: 100%
iPage Plans and Pricing
iPage offers the most affordable hosting solution for small and medium-scale businesses of all sizes. IPage offers a 30-day money back guarantee that enables its customers to give a risk-free trial on their services.
To make it even better, Unlike other hosting providers, they offer only a single cheap hosting plan, so you can easily sign up for an account without confusion.
iPage Server Response Time
Images account for most of the downloadable bytes, without any doubt. Meaning, too many images on a page can drastically slow down your page load time.
The fact is that, conducting a speed test on a site with no content will be different from a content-heavy site. We needed to conduct a more accurate test by ignoring the content since our goal is to test the performance of our server, not the site.
We used another testing tool known as Bitcatcha to get an accurate result. This tool works a bit differently from Pingdom. Bitcatcha works by completely ignoring the content of the site and analyzes server response time around the world.
It averages the loading speed from eight different worldwide locations: London, Brazil, LA, Singapore, Japan, Australia, India, and New York. The speed for each location is measured, and then the results are averaged after being measured three separate times.
You will get a broader overview of how your server responds globally to page requests with this test.
Disadvantage of Using IPage Hosting
IPage has solid uptime and very friendly customer support, and its pricing is among the cheapest. Sad to say, most of their other performance statistics aren’t cool. Let’s take a look:
Lower Loading Time (760ms)
IPage loading times have been mediocre at 760ms over the last 24 months. This simply means that the loading time takes a bit under a second to load a page.
The problem is that you can’t possibly do anything to ‘speed up’ your host, although that’s definitely not the worst we’ve seen. Any heavy files you publish on this site, like adding big sized images, graphics, or creating new pages will only slow down your site.
Extra Fees for Additional Services
Truth being told! IPage has solid offers. You get access to dozens of different popular apps and unlimited storage space and bandwidth. Plus you also get a free domain for the first year, email and SSL certificate.
We’ve seen others well over $10+/month; a renewal rate of $7.99/month isn’t terrible –
However, the pricing starts to increase when you combine this with a few other additional fees.
Most premium web hosting providers we’ve reviewed included things like backups or extra security in their basic plan. Instead of having you pay more for additional services, IPage keeps their main plan cheap by not including these features.
This pricing is not for those who hate being robbed of a penny. It’s perfect for people who don’t want all the extra stuff!
Below are the lists of the different add-on fees:
- Due to their plans to help scan for malware and prevent your site from being hacked, IPage offers SiteLock support.
- You can roll back previously-cleaned versions if your site gets hacked. Backups can be either daily or even weekly. These are very helpful to simply store a record of the past versions of your website when changes are made.
- The bigger subscription plan, for a boundless number of sites, databases, and up to five backups every day, is valued at $2.09/month. The primary backup service is $1.14/month or for a long time ($40.78) for one site, database, and daily backup.
No Free Site Migrations
If you don’t have a prior knowledge of web development and don’t want to waste time trying to figure out how to move site files, re-point your domain, and more. Most of the few web hosting companies we’ve reviewed will move an existing site to their servers for free.
IPage will only move a site for a $150 one-time fee; they do not offer any free site migrations. Compared to other hosts, that’s on the high side. For example, BlueHost will charge you $150 but they’ll move up to five sites for that one price
No cPanel
The industry standard is that most web hosts use cPanel as a dashboard of sorts. If you use it in one place, you’ll know exactly where everything is when you log in from another platform.
IPage works instead with an alternative called vDeck which is not quite as flexible as cPanel. It’s usually difficult for those who are used to working on the same uniform platform. For beginners, this isn’t always a big deal.
This is not a good deal if you haven’t used either cPanel or vDeck before, but when you must have already mastered that on another platform, it can seem like a waste of time to learn a new platform and how to efficiently use it. However, it could be an issue if you’re dependent on cPanel.
Some Frequently Asked Questions About IPage
How does IPage stand out from the other web host companies?
IPage is one of the biggest web hosting providers in the industry. It’s cost effective for both small and medium-scale businesses.
They provide free domain name registration for the first year and free website building tools.
Can IPage Handle High Traffic?
It depends on the plan you choose. IPage can handle high traffic. You’ll be asked to upgrade to a higher plan if your site outgrows your first plan by consuming server resources.
Can I Upgrade My IPage Plan Later?
Yes! You can upgrade your IPage hosting plan when there’s the need to do so.
Does IPage Offer a Month-to-Month Payment Option?
IPage does not have a monthly payment option for their shared hosting plan. But it’s available for higher plans like VPS and dedicated servers.
Conclusion
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