iPage

About

Hi. Thanks for checking out this WebHostingGeeks video review. Visit our website, at WebHostingGeeks.com to see more reviews, and to get the latest information on all the top web hosting services. Today, I’m reviewing iPage Hosting.

iPage Hosting was founded in 1998 in Burlington MA as a web services company, and reborn as a full-service hosting provider in 2009. A year later, they joined the stable of respected hosting giant Endurance International Group. Endurance owns more than 60 brands in the hosting space, including the popular HostGator, Bluehost and Fatcow, and manage they over 10 million domains for more than 3.7 million subscribers. iPage is one of their most popular sites, with more than 1 million domains under management. iPage has two datacentres near Boston MA, with domain registrations handled by Toronto-based Tucows.

Like most hosts, iPage offers a range of VPS and dedicated hosting products. However, they specialize in shared hosting for personal and business use, with a plan they call “iPage Essential”.

 

Products and Features

Frankly, the iPage Essential Plan offers a lot of features for one of lowest hosting prices out there. Most of these features aren’t unique to iPage—things like unlimited website storage, data transfers and emails; free domain registration and a money-back guarantee—lots of other hosts offer these. But few of them also give you unlimited domains and databases for the entry-level price that iPage charges.

There are no set limits on the disk space or amount of data you can transfer with their shared hosting plans. However, they do require you to stick to their Terms of Service, and only use disk space and bandwidth for the normal operation of your personal or small business website. That means no storage or sharing of files that aren’t regularly accessed through your website, and no excessively high bandwidth usage. These usage guidelines are fairly standard in the hosting world, and they accommodate more than 99.9% of personal and small business users. If you think you’re going to need more than this, then you should consider one of iPage’s VPS or Dedicated plans.

iPage lets you create unlimited email accounts, with each mailbox holding up to 500MB of data or 10,000 messages. You get full-featured mail services that include mail forwarding, autoresponders, spam filtering and malware checking.

With the iPage Essential plan, you get access to online marketing guides and credits that you can use with the web’s major advertising carriers, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook and Yellow Pages. The dollar amounts shown here may be current, so check the terms and conditions for details. If you’re interested in selling online, iPage can help you set up your online store. You have a choice of shopping carts that integrate with PayPal, and you can take advantage of their shared SSL for secure transactions.

iPage makes it pretty easy to do the job you came to them for in the first place – that is, hosting a website. Your first domain registration is free for one year, then $15 per year to renew. If you don’t want to create a new domain, you can easily transfer one you already own. And iPage provides wizards and tools that help you turn that raw domain into a finished blog or website. First is WebSite Creator, from a company called CM4all. It’s an easy-to-use WYSIWYG tool that helps you build a website right from your browser. With over 100 templates available, this can be a great way to get started with your first site. You should know that WebSiteCreator lets you build one site with 9 pages for free. A licence for more sites starts at $4.95/month.  iPage also offers the Weebly Drag and Drop Website Builder that you can use to build unlimited sites.

The only issue with drag and drop builders like these is that, if you ever decide to leave iPage, your website won’t transfer to another hosting company unless they use the same tools. If you want your sites to be portable, we suggest building them with WordPress or any other popular content management system, (like Joomla or Drupal) so you can transfer them easily between hosting companies.

As well as the drag-and-drop builders, iPage supports editors such as FrontPage and SiteDelux, and more apps from MOJO Marketplace, that lets you select a template to get your website started. In fact, there are nearly a hundred apps that install with just one click from MOJO Marketplace, including the popular ones like Drupal, Zenphoto, PrestaShop, LimeSurvey and WordPress.

WordPress gets special treatment with two plans of its own: WordPress Starter and WordPress Essential. Both let you choose a theme for your blogsite from a hand-picked selection of built-in themes with all the necessary WordPress plugins already installed. Both Starter and Essential let you register your new domain free for the first year. Essential adds high-speed caching, a deluxe security bundle, and expert, personalized WordPress support.

iPage backs up their server farms daily to allow disaster recovery and they strongly advise customers to manage their own website backups. Personally, I would purchase a little peace of mind with their automated backup and restore service for about $1 a month. You can also add identity theft protection and malware scanning, with their SiteLock security package for another $2 a month on a 3-year term. Other add-ons include Private domain hosting. For an extra $10 on your domain registration fee, this is a highly recommended service that prevents anyone from getting your private contact information from the domain registrar.

Finally, iPage is a green service provider. The company buys Renewable Energy Certificates to offset approximately 200% of its energy consumption. This means that, effectively, your website and all its services are wind-powered. Should you choose to use it, iPage provides a badge you can put on your site that links to their green certificate.

If you want to find out more about most of these features, just go to www.iPage.com and hover over any of these question marks, or click Help, and browse the Knowledgebase.

Before we look at the purchase process, I need to mention the iPage Anytime, money-back guarantee. If you cancel your account within the first 30 days, for any reason, iPage will refund all the hosting charges you’ve paid, but not the charges for other services, such as SiteLock or Domain privacy for example. And if you’ve also paid for a domain name, it’s yours to keep, and they don’t refund the registration fee. iPage states their guarantee applies “anytime”, not just in the first 30 days, but read the fine print. Their User Agreement says that, if you decide to leave iPage after the first 30 days, they will charge you the full amount for the current month, and refund just the remaining hosting charges. They may still charge for any other services you’ve ordered, right to the end of your contract term, as well as a minimum $35 early cancellation fee.

So how easy is it to sign up for an iPage hosting plan? Like most hosting sites out there, they make it a simple, 5-minute process to create a domain, select and configure a hosting plan, and provide your payment info. Why don’t we do that now, and you can see where they offer you many of the things we’ve been talking about.

 

Performance

Now let’s talk about performance.

Stats collected from a variety of measuring sources indicate that iPage has an overall uptime average of 99.92%, since Sept. 2005. This gives them an industry rating of Excellent.

Their best monthly performance is 100% which they hit nearly every month. Their worst performance to date was in October 2013, when a data centre outage lasting nearly an hour brought them down to 97.17% availability.

So what do these numbers mean to you? How satisfied will you be with iPage as the host of your blog or website? Let’s see what some real iPage customers say.

 

Customer Reviews

For the past six years, customer satisfaction has averaged 3.78 stars out of 5, or 75.67%.  For the most recent 6 months, iPage customers have given the company an average rating of 3.69 stars, or 73.86%.

These ratings come from more than 600 customer reviews. Out of those, exactly half gave iPage 5 stars, 14% gave them 4 stars, 9% awarded them 3 stars, and 27% of reviewers gave them 2 stars or less.

Positive comments seem to focus on how easy it is to set up and manage a website using the control panel. There is also strong support for iPage pricing, which is lower than nearly all other hosting providers. Customers are strongly in favor of the money-back guarantee they can invoke anytime. Many people were also happy with the long-term reliability and uptime of iPage’s servers.

On the downside, some reviewers found iPage support could not solve problems with their service. Others report difficulty with automated renewals and billing errors. There are a number of reviews that cite long wait times when contacting  customer support, and then ending up with a call centre in India, instead of the North American support staff.

On balance, it appears their satisfaction rating of about 75% accurately reflects the comments left by reviewers. Of course, you can read all 620 reviews right here, at webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews.

 

Purchasing the Hosting Plan

Now I’m going to go to the iPage site, register a domain name, and purchase 1 year of iPage Essential service. I’d also like to see if it’s possible to have them pre-install WordPress for me.

Then we’ll see how long it takes to complete the transaction and what kind of confirmations we receive. But first…

But remember to sign up from the Web Hosting Geeks site. Hosting companies like iPage always give the best online deals to Geeks visitors, so to get any current specials, go to  webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews/iPage and click this green button.

We’ve seen this page before. Now we’ll click the Sign Up button to create and activate a new account.

The first step is to provide a domain you wish to use. You can either use a name you already own, or you can register a new on here. Like this. If the name you want is available, you’ll be taken to the next page to enter billing information for your account. I’ll just do that now.

Because I’m registering a new .ca domain, I have to provide a little more info for the Canadian Internet Reg’n Authority…

Now, we get to select a plan from this dropdown, currently one, two or three years, and I’m going to take one year. There’s a little smoke & mirrors here about all the great stuff you’re getting; the only things that matter are the guarantee and the free domain registration. The rest is pretty standard.

So now we get to the first upsell. You can switch plans to WordPress Essential for an extra three bucks a month; add the security and performance enhancements; integrate some Google apps, ‘though you can get most of these through your browser anyway; automate website and data backups; and use the goMobi to optimize sites for mobile users. For now, I’m happy with the free version of Sitelock that’s included with the plan, but I will subscribe to their automated backup service since I’m not that disciplined about doing regular backups.

Okay, we’ve made our choices, so let’s hit the check out. On the next page, iPage ask for a little information about how we plan to use their services and build our sites. I think that if you answer these questions honestly, it might help iPage setup your account, but I don’t actually know how they use these answers. Maybe we should give their support line a call and ask them that. Of course, you can also opt out of this questionnaire if you want to. For now, I’ll fill in what I know and Submit it.

And now, more opportunities to buy stuff. You can get an SSL certificate for $40 a year... you can buy additional domain names… or you can just say “no thanks” and you’re done! This page shows us the progress of our account setup, details of our order, and gives us a chance to look at some short tutorial videos.

Once the lid goes on the gift box up here, it’s finished. You have to look carefully to notice the “Log In” link right here. Click it to log in to your account and create a password and a security question. Don’t forget to accept the Terms of Service right here. When we click Continue, we’ll go to our Control Panel.

Ah, but what’s this? A nasty popup trying to sell me an SSL certificate. Duh, nuh-uh! And then a plea for more demographic data. But if you scroll down, you’re already in the vDeck Control Panel, so since we’re here, let’s have a little tour.

 

vDeck Control Panel Demo

iPage uses a customized version of the popular vDeck control panel. Just as with other portals like cPanel, it puts all the tools and information you need to manage your websites in one convenient place. In the iPage version, you get a Quick Start section at the top that lets you jump straight into your website editor, add mailboxes, and create a new domain.

‘Walk Me Through’ is another useful feature that presents a list of common tasks available through the control panel. Clicking an item in the list either takes you to an explanation in the Knowledgebase, or shows you step-by-step notes as you actually do the task. Very helpful.

You can jump into six sections of the Control Panel from this menu. The sixth one (Account) is way over here on the right. Here’s the tour.

The Website section is where you’ll start, to build your site, install apps and do backups. Here is where you install Wordpress for example. And MOJO Marketplace is where you can access more than 100 one-click installers for major apps. Note that iPage uses their own MOJO Marketplace, instead of the more popular Softaculous and Fantastico script installers.               

Next, you can setup your email accounts, and manage mail and spam settings.

The Domain section lets you register and manage domains, while Marketing gives you tools to create and run your web ad campaigns.

Additional tools include the Scripting PowerPack and SiteLock security suite. And the Account section is where you manage all your user, account and billing information.

You can customize this sidebar to show more things, like how much storage and bandwidth your account has consumed. To learn more, check out the Knowledgebase.

 

Conclusions

Overall, iPage Hosting seems to offer good quality and decent value for the money. They have one, low-priced shared hosting plan, and two shared plans that are optimized for WordPress. Website, account and domain management is handled through the vDeck control panel.

Customer satisfaction is covered by an Anytime, money-back guarantee, but make sure you read the User Agreement so you know what that means.

Server availability is very good, with very few outages for the last two years. On average, they have beaten the 99.9% industry benchmark since 2005.

The majority of customers are satisfied with their service through iPage, and give them a 75% approval rating.

Buying a hosting plan was easy and it only took a few minutes to register a domain and create an account.

Tech Support was prompt and friendly; however, they tried to upsell us.

Through our personal experience with iPage, we feel they deliver reliable web hosting services and excellent value. We recommend them to you.

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