iPage

Editor Review:

The name iPage may remind you of Apple’s iPhone, but there’s no copying here! The brand’s been around since 1995 — it’s practically a hosting original.

That being said, iPage does have a lot in common with the iPhone. The iPage team’s focus on usability is unparalleled. This host makes it exceptionally easy to create websites, online stores, blogs and more. They even have a team dedicated solely to improving the customer experience — regularly conducting customer surveys; usability studies; and performance testing for the control panel, mail, FTP and more — and they actually make changes in response to their findings.

Not only that, iPage is the only host that includes SiteLock’s security suite into its hosting package at no extra charge! As part of their hosting plan, iPage customers get daily malware and spam scans, along with a security certification they can post on their sites.

Features:

Free Setup
99.9% UpTime Guarantee
FREE Domain Name FOR LIFE
UNLIMITED Disk Space
UNLIMITED Bandwidth
Anytime Day Money Back Guarantee

Summary:

Give iPage a go. This hosting vet offers an extremely competitive hosting package, tools that are a cinch to learn but offer loads of flexibility for beginners and experts alike, incredible security and a support team that is trained to listen to its customers and address their concerns.

Reliability:

Great! iPage boasts a unique pooled architecture, versus the more typical server-based architecture. This means that the sites are fed out of a central storage area to the server that is capable of loading the site in the fastest amount of time. It also means that a failure of one or more servers won’t impact site performance.

We’ve been very impressed with the uptime and speed of page loads, CGI, webmail and FTP — as well as site and service availability.

Price:

While iPage’s pricing is incredible for our readers — just $3.75/month — it has several unique offerings that set it apart. First, the iPage plans include the SiteLock security suite, which is worth the $3.75 alone. You’ll also have the opportunity to talk to support reps who are located in North America — and do a great job LISTENING to their customers. They also offer unlimited diskspace, data transfer, email boxes and MySQL databases. With the 30-day money-back guarantee (which we tested), you’re getting a great deal of service for the dollar.

Control Panel:

iPage has a robust, but simple-to-use control panel that makes it easy to 1) manage your website and email 2) keep track of your overall account(s) 3) take advantage of the many scripts, marketing offers, and services iPage offers, and 4) get system updates.

We’re big fans of their QuickStart wizard and tutorials, all accessible from the control panel’s central navigation.

In addition, iPage actually offers control panel skins, giving folks a choice between managing their websites through text, icons and broader categories. They also give users a choice to add a few widgets — and tell us more widgets are coming soon.

Overall, we give the control panel an A-. We knocked a few points off because we think the settings in the left navigation pane of the control panel are a bit too detailed for most users.

Customer Support:

iPage offers 24×7 phone, chat and email support. We had great experiences with the phone support. They’re all based in North America, answer the calls quickly and are well trained. Chat agents are solid and were able to resolve our issues (though we suspect they try to juggle too many chats at once). Email support — provided primarily through the control panel — is good quality and turn-around times are reasonable for this type of support, but we prefer the instant gratification of phone and chat.

Overall, we found iPage support to be highly effective and our issues were resolved. We were especially impressed with the knowledge and professionalism of their Tier 2 support team.