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iPage Review

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PlansPrice Per Month
iPage Hosting$3.50/month
FeaturesSpecifications
Min disk space allowed Unlimited
Min Bandwidth Allowed Unlimited
Addon domains Unlimited
Free Domain yes
Free site builder yes
CGI/BIG Access yes
SSI Access yes
FTP Access yes
HTTPS Support yes

iPage Review

Website: http://www.iPage.com

For over a decade, iPage has been providing reliable, professional web hosting from their headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. They fit a surprising amount of services and features into a very small price tag, including a free domain registration, Google AdWords credit, SiteLock security and unlimited email addresses. In addition, they offer extensive help documentation, a money-back guarantee, unlimited tech support and many other perks. Having all of the necessary ingredients for a website in one single service makes iPage ideal for bloggers, webmasters and anyone else who wants cheap, dependable hosting without a difficult setup process.

Their prices vary based on how many months of hosting purchased, but during special promotions they have been as low as $2.95 per month, lower than almost any other competitor. A new customer could lock in a monthly rate of $2.95 for as long as three years if they signed up during a sale. iPage has 6 locations worldwide, 800 employees and over a million happy websites under their watch, so bargain-hunters can take advantage of their sales with complete confidence.

iPage Highlights

As you might expect from any reputable host, iPage offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth, domains and MySQL databases. They also provide the usual support for widely-used content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress and Joomla. But, iPage goes above and beyond these standard offerings with solid security, quick-acting disaster recovery measures, eco-friendliness and a very strong affiliate program.

Solid Security – iPage automatically employs firewalls, virus checking and 24-hour security at their data centers, providing assurance that even your most sensitive data is safe from any kind of hacking or theft attempts.

Disaster Recovery Measures – iPage websites are hosted on server clusters, which work as a team to keep your website up and running. If one machine were to fail, the others instantly take over the hosting duties. If your hosting were on a single server, this would be a big headache for a site owner, but iPage designed their systems so that you (and your site visitors) might not even notice such a problem.

Eco-Friendliness – While iPage does have a small carbon footprint (and their backup generator is diesel-powered), they purchase renewable energy credits that power their websites with pure wind energy. Not every host can make a claim to being “green,” but iPage customers can be proud that their web hosts are spending good money on reducing their impact on the environment.

A Strong Affiliate Program – The iPage affiliate program boasts a large payout of $105 per new customer. If you’re happy with iPage hosting, you might already be inclined to recommend them, but at over $100 per referral, their affiliate program is truly rewarding. In addition to sharing their profits, they also offer pre-made banners and advertisements to further assist you in your referral efforts.

Downsides of iPage Hosting

While there aren’t many obvious downsides to iPage’s hosting service, their products aren’t ideal for everyone. Their main product is a one-size-fits-most hosting service with an impressive amount of bells and whistles, but certain kinds of customers just don’t fit it very well. Customers building large, specialized websites might want their own dedicated servers instead of a shared pool of computer systems. Some might want more control over the server configuration and management than iPage can offer. In other words, some customers might want to buy more than just a few dollars per month of hosting. Competitors offer powerful, customizable hosting packages that can cost as much as thousands per month, but iPage offers no such equivalent. As a result, a successful website could easily “outgrow” iPage’s standard hosting products. On iPage’s website under “scalability,” they do not offer more powerful hosting; only higher quality email service and upgraded shopping carts.

As well, iPage imposes a 10MB upload cap, and also limits your email to 250MB which is a consideration if you want to keep a lot of email or attachments on their server. Be aware, that the fine print also imposes a $35 cancellation fee that some users have been surprised by.

iPage Uptime and Reliability

Over the past 2200 days, iPage has been up 99.96% of the time, though customer complaints about period server slowness are not uncommon.

Conclusion

Overall, iPage offers a great hosting package at a very competitive price. They’ve clearly refined a service that satisfies the vast majority of prospective customers, and they’ve thrown in a lot of free bonus features that come at a cost with most of their rival hosts. Having said that, if you require a specialized setup – now or in the future – you may find that you’ve outgrown iPage’s standard service. Most web projects start with standard tools, popular CMS platforms and other common technologies. But, as those projects develop and evolve, they often end up requiring specialized hosting setups. If you’ve locked yourself into a few years of standard hosting – even at a great price – you’re no longer saving money if the product isn’t suiting your needs anymore.

So, consider the scope of your website, and look as far into the future as you can. If your website will be using typical systems and software indefinitely, then iPage is an excellent choice for web hosting. But, if you have any foreseeable need for non-standard setups or special server configurations, you might want to consider a host that has a more customizable product, even if that product is a little more costly.

Click here to review iPage’s latest plans & offers

iPage Hosting Reviews

“Not only is it easy to set up, but iPage also offers a number of tutorials and helpful FAQs if needed.”

“I’ve heard horror stories about other web providers and feared for the worst. This has NOT been the case with iPage.”

“I joined iPage and found that I didn’t like their page builders. I was able to online chat with someone in billing and cancel. They said I will be receiving a full refund!”

Peter North

Peter is a Director of Digital Marketing at an investment holdings company in Washington DC. He’s worked for nonprofits, startups and established enterprises, and he’s left a long trail of happy clients and effective websites.

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Manas Rawat March 21, 2013 at 2:26 am

iPage.com is the worst web hosting service. I had an account with them where I hosted all my a lot of stuff – my blogs, websites of my company and my friends’ companies – mostly wordpress sites. Their renewal date was 20th March 2013. However, on 19th March, they arbitrarily DELETED ALL MY STUFF – WEBSITES, DATABASES, EMAILS, DOMAIN SETTINGS – EVERYTHING. Since then I have been struggling with them – trying to get my account restored. Their service guy told me if I buy a new account, everything will be restored. So I bought a new account. Then they said that it will cost additional 75$ to restore my stuff. I got that waived after fighting with them. Now almost 2 days have passed. My settings have not been restored. A lot of our emails are bouncing – sites are inaccessible. :( iPage is the absolutely WORST web hosting service – My advice to everyone is – DO NOT USE IT.

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Andy October 12, 2012 at 5:48 am

iPage customer Support went rapidly downhill a couple of years back causing me to switch hosting elsewhere last year. iPage made themselves look even worse by completely screwing up the domain transfer and causing me to lose the registration of it. Now I find they’ve even been charging me for hosting for the past year that they weren’t providing and they refuse to refund it since they conveniently don’t have a record of my cancellation instructions.
Avoid these people like the plague, they’re only interested in money, they may not be a scam but they don’t give a damn about their customers.

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