April 15th, 2011 
Review Monsters Our website is currently being hosted by iPage. Seeing as we are just starting out, we wanted relatively cheap hosting but also ensuring that uptime, speed, etc was as fast and reliable as could be. Cheap hosting may be good but if your visitors experience is bad, that is where your website will start to suffer and soon, you will see a decrease in traffic to your website. In this article, we will discuss iPage and our adventure with them!
iPage Web Hosting
The brand ‘iPage’ has been established for more than a decade but the company went inactive during mid-2000s. In year 2009, the company was restructured and relaunched by a large international business group and iPage is now back in the web hosting game.
From our research, iPage is backed by a huge team of industry veterans – both management and technical teams are lead by experts with at least 10 years of industry experience; and their platform is hosting more than 1.5 million domain names at this time of writing.
We would put them in the cheap web hosting category purely based on price. Plans start at only $4.50 per month which is very cheap when compared to other hosting companies. Their benefits stand above almost anyone else. For $4.50, you recieve unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts and a free domain.
iPage – Detailed Review
iPage ensures availability and high performance by utilising a load balanced server architecture. According to the iPage website, it operates two data centers, each equipped with state of the art features. iPage does not cut any corners, taking all the measures to ensure an adequate level of security for its facilities and the highest degree of reliability for the customers. A commitment that iPage commits itself to and you must give it credit for it that they assure that your site will be up and running with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Their price value is excellent. You get what you pay for and then some with features such as multiple site builders, web-based mail and a comprehensive file manager. Useful e-commerce features are plenty available with a variety of shopping cart programs, seamless PayPal integration and an SSL secure server. iPage gives away even more free programs in the form of popular blog scripts, forums, photo galleries and open-source content management systems.
The control panel is the one area iPage is different from most other web hosting companies. The control panel is the browser-based program you use to control your hosting account.
Just because iPage’s control panel is different from other web hosts doesn’t mean that it’s rubbish! All we are saying is that it will take you a little getting use to, it certainly took us some time to navigate around. If you’re new to web hosting, you will obviously not notice this difference. The most popular control panel our there is cPanel, which is much easier to use in our opinion.
Support has become a vital part of web hosts these days. iPage offers 24 hour a day, 7 days a week support by live chat, e-mail, telephone and their support ticket system. Its support system has been commended for quickly responding to customers and resolving issues. We had a few issues and can vouch for this, they were very speedy at responding. You will also have access to a wide range of articles that will more than likely solve your issue before your contact the support team at iPage.
We recommend iPage over other shared hosting companies because of their commitment to fast customer support and the fact you get more overall features for your money ($4.50 a month). If you’re looking for affordable web hosting with a lot of features, iPage Hosting is a safe bet for you and your website.
iPage Web Hosting – Cons
Unfortunately iPage does not have any possibility of upgrade. If your sites get very busy over time, you have to switch to a new web hosting provider which offer virtual or dedicated servers in order. iPage don’t provide windows hosting solution. ASP.net is not supported on their current servers. They don’t support SSH access. This is not a huge issue for beginners as it will probably not be needed, but any advanced users may feel the need to have SSH. iPage still has few problems with database connections and websites that are powered by Joomla, WordPress or Drupal. We currently have one 3 sites running via Joomla! with iPage and we must say, the do run much slower, especially the generation time of the page. We have few http requests, etc on these pages so we are fairly sure it isn’t us!
If you are interested in iPage, be sure to take a look at the website as they have more details on there that we have not covered. Be sure to read any terms and conditions before taking out a plan.
Take me to iPage – Web Hosting NOW!
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