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iPage Hosting Reviews

Overall Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

Review Summary

Updated: January 7, 2023

On top of their straightforward hosting packages, iPages offers some of the most affordable hosting packages for WordPress, VPS, and dedicated hosting. iPage makes it extremely quick and easy to get your website up and running.

Pros

Cons

Shared Hosting Review

Best for Portfolio and Basic websites

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Multiple Sites Whether you can host multiple domains on this hosting plan.
    • Disk Storage
    • Bandwidth Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 10GB
      – eCommerce sites: 15GB+
    • Email Accounts Plans with email accounts included save you the hassle of having to setup your own email hosting.
    • Free Migration Transfer If you’re migrating your website from another company or plan, you might need support migrating your website to the new servers.
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product

Straying away from the typical tiered hosting plans offered by most companies, iPage offers a single shared hosting solution boasting unlimited resources. Hosting also includes optional, premium add-ons, aimed to provide customers a tailored solution. If you’re looking to create a basic website, portfolio, or blog, this plan could be the right fit for you.

What’s included

One of the most attractive features iPage offers with shared hosting is ‘unlimited’ disk space and scalable bandwidth. This, combined with a free ‘Let’s Encrypt’ SSL and a free domain for one-year, helps take the guesswork out choosing hosting. Providing all the essentials for creating a website. That being said, there are some usage limitations you’ll want to understand before signing up. This is common across the industry and explained best in iPage’s Acceptable Use Policy.

Consuming an excessive amount of server resources is prohibited. This leads to server performance issues and may cause a disruption to our systems or other customers.

To put this into perspective (according to iPage’s User Agreement), your site will not be able to utilize any more than 3GB of disk space for MySQL/PostgreSQL databases. With accounts in having over 200,000 inodes considered excessive. Moreover, the User Agreement also outlines that disk space cannot be used for backup storage. Again, this is common across most hosting providers with a similar offering and makes sense, considering the limited amount of disk space allocated by default. As a solution, iPage recommends purchasing the ‘Site Backup & Restore’ add-on at checkout. While the price is minimal, it does add another $14.99 per year on top of hosting and is a service that some hosts provide for free.

iPage maintains a similar policy in regards to all other server resources, including CPU usage, bandwidth, and data transfer for shared hosting accounts. In that, there are no arbitrary limits, as long as your usage doesn’t affect other customer’s access to server resources. Most users will never run into this as an issue, and iPage claims 99.5% of users should be able to grow their site traffic without any concerns.

iPage also allows you to add an unlimited number of domains, SQL databases, and personalized email addresses. Usually, you would want dedicated databases for each of our websites, which makes this plan one of the best to host multiple sites. Most shared hosting providers limit the number of domains and SQL databases on lower-tier plans.

Beginner-friendly hosting experience

For managing your website, iPage provides the vDeck hosting panel on all plans. It’s not quite as powerful as cPanel, but it’s arguably easier to use. For example, vDeck doesn’t have access to FTP or .htaccess, and there are fewer management add-ons available.

With vDeck, you’ll still have the ability to one-click install WordPress or some other CMS tools like Joomla!, Drupal, or OpenCart for free, just like in cPanel. On top of letting you build an e-commerce site for free, you can also integrate PayPal for a secure payment option. It’s also quick and easy to add features, like SiteLock, to your account. SiteLock is a popular website security suite that can actively scan for malware or hacking attempts. With premium SiteLock packages, you can even get hands-on security support.

Server Technology

iPage also claims to host their shared servers on world-class technology. Load balanced servers, 24/7 network monitoring, two data center locations, and advanced router infrastructure is all part of the package. While this should increase performance and resource availability for customers, it’s a standard setup and expected of any decent hosting provider.

Pricing

iPage’s web hosting plan is one of the cheapest offerings you’ll find the market. New customers will only have to pay $1.99 per month for their first term. At renewal, you’ll be looking at $7.99/month (not including any add-ons), which is slightly less than the market average.

Moreover, you won’t find any month-to-month payment options with iPage, so expect to pay for your first year(s) of hosting upfront. Like most hosts, iPage ensure that the longer your contract (up to 3-year terms), the more savings you’ll get on hosting. Just be sure to keep an eye on your renewal date to ensure any unwanted surprises.

When it comes to add-ons, your total price for hosting can get a bit pricey – depending on your selections. To start, the free domain offered at signup does renew at $14.99 per year, after the initial period. If you’re looking for Domain Privacy, this is an extra $9.99 per year, as an optional add-on at sign up. iPage’s automated ‘Backup and Restore’ service is also an essential feature for most. Costing $14.99 per year, and it does cost $100 to restore a copy; if the scenario were ever to occur.

If you were to purchase all add-ons to your hosting, such as SiteLock, G-Suite, WordPress-Optimizer, and Website Builder, you’d be looking at over $240 for your first year of hosting (this including the first year discount). Whilst this is far from the most economical option for shared hosting, iPage still fulfill their goal to provide a tailored and resource-effective hosting solution, particularly for new, inexperienced users. Finally, if you’re ever unhappy with your hosting, iPage offers a 30-day money-back guarantee to all customers. Just keep in mind, this doesn’t cover the price for the domain or any add-on services.

WordPress Hosting Review

Best for: Blogs and eCommerce sites

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Multiple Sites Whether you can host multiple domains on this hosting plan.
    • Disk Storage
    • Bandwidth Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 10GB
      – eCommerce sites: 15GB+
    • Email Accounts Plans with email accounts included save you the hassle of having to setup your own email hosting.
    • Free Migration Transfer If you’re migrating your website from another company or plan, you might need support migrating your website to the new servers.
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product

iPage’s offer WordPress hosting packages that provide a solution for both new users and those with existing sites, looking to migrate over. Just like the shared hosting, both plans, bot WP Starter and Essential, come with ‘Unlimited’ storage and bandwidth, and thus, are also subject to the same terms and conditions mentioned in our shared hosting review. That being said, you’ll also get a free SSL certificate, ‘unlimited’ personalized email accounts, and a free domain name with the plans aswell.

If you’re wondering what the main benefits you can get with WordPress tailored plans are, you’ll find that a majority of them come included free with the Jetpack plugin. Jetpack is included on both plans and provides a suite of WordPress features and optimizations. These being:

  • 100+ free website themes
  • Content caching and optimization via Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Security features, such as automated backups and malware scanners/removers.

You can unlock even more of these features by upgrading your Jetpack account, although, because JetPack is a third-party service, expect to pay this separately from usual hosting fees. With WP Essential, you’ll get even more features for a bump in price, with access to expert WordPress support, automatic malware removal, and SiteLock for free. In partnership with SiteLock, this includes a custom firewall specifically for WordPress websites. We’d recommend this option if you run an online store, an online business, or if your site contains any sensitive information.

Quickstart WordPress hosting

Configuring your WordPress website after signup is quick and straightforward via the setup wizard. Automatically installing WordPress for you, you’ll get access straight away when you log in to your site, with a short, optional tutorial explaining how to create pages and set up your Jetpack account.

iPage will also automatically install the W3 Total Cache and Google Analytics plugins. These plugins are extremely useful, with the former improving page speed support performance and the latter tracks and reports your site traffic. Your WordPress website can be easily managed from iPage’s custom hosting dashboard.

Price

iPage’s WP Starter plan is even cheaper than its shared hosting, making this the better option if you want to host a WordPress site. Price-wise, iPage’s tailored WordPress plans are slightly cheaper than most on the market. In most part, this is due to the fact it is an unmanaged solution, with the Jetpack plugin performing most of the automated security and performance tasks you need.

They also offer month-to-month flexibility with WordPress plans, and, unlike other hosts, they don’t charge any extra setup fees. That being said, the yearly sign up options do come with more discounts, as you’ll have to pay upfront, but be aware that promotional pricing doesn’t apply on renewal. For peace of mind, iPage’s WordPress hosting is also covered by their risk-free money-back guarantee, in case you ever wanted to jump ship.

VPS Hosting Review

Best for: High Traffic and Fast Growing sites

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Managed Managed servers are generally recommended if you are looking for specialised or advanced server hosting and have little to low technical skills
    • CPU (Cores)
    • Disk Storage
    • Bandwidth Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 10GB
      – eCommerce sites: 15GB+
    • RAM Minimum Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 4GB
      – eCommerce sites: 4GB-6GB of RAM
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product
    • Basic
    • 1
    • 10 GB
    • 1 TB
    • 1 GB
    • $19.99/mo $24.99/mo 80%OFF
    • View
    • Business
    • 2
    • 20 GB
    • 3 TB
    • 4 GB
    • $47.99/mo $59.49/mo 81%OFF
    • View
    • Optimum
    • 4
    • 20 GB SSD
    • 4 TB
    • 8 GB
    • $79.99/mo $99.99/mo 80%OFF
    • View

What’s Included

iPage offers three VPS hosting plans; Basic, Business, and Optimum. ‘Basic’ is a great starting point for customers looking to upgrade from a shared hosting package. Especially if you’re just looking to host a single site, the included 40GB of disk space will be more than enough to host many pages or a high amount of content.

On the other end of the spectrum, the ‘Optimum’ plan ramps things up. It includes enough dedicated resources to host small web applications or eCommerce sites with the ‘Business’ plan great for everything in-between. You still get all the expected freebies with VPS plans, these being an SSL certificate, domain for the first year, email accounts, and at least one free IP address for your first domain hosted.

Self-managed VPS Hosting

iPages self-managed VPS hosting packages puts you in full control of setting up and managing your VPS environment. Their servers run CentOS 6.4 and come with cPanel as standard. Although this is the recommended configuration, you can always install another panel and can also enable full root access if wanted. Just be careful as some mistakes made in root access may not be covered by iPage’s VPS support. You can also use the available Java/SSH terminal for command-line access to your machine.

iPage’s VPS support can help you with most of the potential issues you might encounter, for example:

  • Root password resets
  • Physical server monitoring
  • cPanel, CentOS, or Service patching, etc.

Of course, you still have access to regular 24/7 chat and phone support. However, there’s no mention of whether iPage offers premium support for VPS customers. This is something many other VPS hosts provide to help customers with the more advanced problems they might face and tailored, one-on-one support they might need.

Via the iPage dashboard, you can also administer your VPS server from the outside. The easy-to-use panel includes options to reboot, stop, or start the server as well as set a hostname or add new IP addresses.

Data centers

Although iPage does have two data centers, both are in Boston, Massachusetts, which is why there is no option to choose your data center. However, two are still better than one, and mean iPage has more infrastructure to provide better resource access for each customer. iPage’s VPS servers utilize OpenStack/KVM technology, which is one of the most popular virtualization technologies at the moment. They also use high-speed SAN storage, which improves the speed at which your website serves data.

Plan pricing, flexibility, and scalability

iPage offers VPS hosting plans with monthly, yearly, or biannual terms. So, whether you want flexible month-to-month hosting or the savings that come with a longer-term plan, iPage has you covered. They also offer some of the most affordable VPS hosting packages. However, they don’t offer quite as extensive resources as some other providers. Instead, their focus is on providing affordable VPS plans for entry-level VPS hosting needs.

Although the VPS plans cater to customers who need improved performance and stability than shared servers, they don’t quite offer an enterprise-scale product. You can also upgrade or downgrade your VPS plans at any time, but you can’t upgrade individual resources on the fly.

VPS plans are also covered by the 30-days or your money-back guarantee. Although many other hosts catch you out with extremely low first-term prices that then almost double in price, iPage’s renewal rates are only $5-$20 more depending on your plan. The same T&Cs apply to the VPS plans when it comes to the cancellation and refund policy. Moreover, the same add-ons are also available, like SiteLock, backup and restore, or G Suite.

Dedicated Server Review

Best for: High traffic sites, maximum resources & security

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Managed Managed servers are generally recommended if you are looking for specialised or advanced server hosting and have little to low technical skills
    • CPU (Cores)
    • Disk Storage
    • Bandwidth Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 10GB
      – eCommerce sites: 15GB+
    • RAM Minimum Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 4GB
      – eCommerce sites: 4GB-6GB of RAM
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product
    • Startup
    • 2
    • 30 GB HDD
    • 5 TB
    • 4 GB
    • $119.99/mo $149.99/mo 80%OFF
    • View

What’s included

iPage’s entry-level startup plan comes with 2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB of storage, 5 TB of bandwidth, and 3 IP addresses. This scales up to 4 CPU cores, 16 GB of RAM, 1000 GB of storage, 15 TB of bandwidth, and 5 IP addresses. This range of computing power is enough for most needs of large companies or sizable e-commerce websites that see high daily traffic. However, some competitors offer much more resource-intensive dedicated server packages for true enterprise-grade needs.

Once again, iPage includes a bunch of freebies you’ll want when creating a new website, such as a free domain, SSL certificate, email, and the ability to add an unlimited number of domains to one account. These features are rarely included with dedicated servers which makes it a standout aspect of iPage’s offering.

The dedicated servers are also very similar to the VPS servers with CentOS and cPanel. A customized version of vDeck is also included for hosting management, while iPage’s dedicated server administrator dashboard provides almost the same controls. All iPage’s dedicated servers are entirely self-managed, although they also provide support services that cover the most common issues.

Price

iPage offers three dedicated server packages that scale nicely from the entry-level Startup to the top-level Enterprise plan. iPage’s dedicated server plans cost relatively the same as most competitors’. However, they don’t offer the most expansive range of resources, and you don’t have the flexibility to upgrade resources individually. That being said, if you want to host a website on a dedicated server, it’s one of the most convenient offerings to get started with. As their servers are cloud-based, new resources can be provisioned almost instantly. That means you can sign up or migrate to a larger package with virtually no downtime.

Top Features

Great for beginners

iPage provides a simple, easy to setup and effective hosting solution for inexperienced customers.

Scalable Server Environments

iPage servers scale right upto dedicated environments, this ensures you’ll be supported as your business grows.

Affiliate Program

Earn upto $150 for each customer you recommend to iPage.

WordPress Plans

Enhanced plans to help new users kickstart their WordPress Site.

iPage Server Performance

Average Review Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

To test iPage’s hosting performance we used a few Pingdom reports. Over the span of a year, Pingdom’s probes (located across North America) performed daily checks, on a basic website (less than 100KBs) hosted on iPage’s shared server environment. Additionally, there was no throttling added to these checks, so slower response times can be expected for 3G or 4G connections.

Yearly Server Performance:

  • Average Uptime

    100.00%

  • Average Response Time

    0.00ms

  • Monthly Downtime

    No Downtime

Data shown as monthly Uptime averages for a basic Godaady website

Server performance can affect all aspects of your site. Case studies have consistently found that customer wait times (page load and response times) directly affect everything from SEM, revenue, and traffic growth. By a lot too, here’s just one example: 

For Mobify, every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed worked out to a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion, yielding an average annual revenue increase of nearly $380,000.

Security

By default, iPage doesn’t offer too much in the way of security. This is part of the reason why their one-size-fits-all hosting can be so affordable. However, they do provide some excellent tools to improve your website’s security and availability. By investing a little extra, you can protect your website against almost any threat, whether it’s malicious or just human error.

SiteLock

In terms of security, SiteLock integration is by far and away iPage’s prime feature. It’s a separate suite of website security and performance tools and one of the best of its kind. SiteLock can be added as a paid add-on to any plan, from shared hosting to dedicated servers. However, WP Essential customers get SiteLock Essentials for free.

SiteLock is supported by all popular CMSs, such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and Magento. The bottom-tier Essentials plan already provides just about everything you need to secure a website:

  • Daily malware scans and automatic removal
  • Block automated bot attacks
  • And, a Sitelock seal on your website to show customers your site’s protected

With higher-tier SiteLock plans, you can unlock even better security:

  • Shorter response times
  • Database scanning
  • A web application firewall
  • DDoS protection
  • CMS security patching

SiteLock even comes with a built-in CDN (Content Delivery Network) to speed up your website across the globe. Purchasing SiteLock as an account add-on is also cheaper than buying it separately for your website. So, you can have peace of mind without straining your budget too much.

Free SSL certificates

SSL certificates are essential to ensure secure browsing on your website, no matter what kind of site it is. As a must-have, it’s nice that iPage provides free SSL certificates for all their hosting plans, even VPS and dedicated servers.

For e-commerce or large business websites, you’ll probably want a premium SSL certificate. In that case, iPage does offer premium domain validated, WildCard, or enhanced e-commerce SSL certificates by Comodo SSL. Depending on how much extra you can afford to spend on security, these certificates can provide secure encryption for any type of website. Comodo SSL certificates also come with a warranty of as much as $1,75 million in case it fails.

Backup & restore

Backup & restore is an essential add-on for iPage plans. It features daily backups of your website(s) as well as a free backup restore tool. It’s essential because, without it, iPage keeps backups only for 14 days, and restoring backup costs $100. The backup and restore add-on allows you to create backups and restore previous versions at any time, as much as you like. It also only cost a modest $1 a month extra, billed annually.

Jetpack

Although you can install Jetpack for free anyways, it’s nice that iPage offers this plugin pre-installed. Jetpack is a utility plugin for WordPress with a range of features from WordPress themes to performance and security enhancements. On the security front, even the free Jetpack license comes with brute-force attack protection, secure authentication for website participants, site activity and downtime monitoring as well as auto-updates for your plugins. With a paid subscription, you can unlock even more features, like backups, migration, spam filtering, and malware detection and removal.

Customer Support Review

When you host a website, the last thing you want is to wait for support, mainly if your issue affects your website’s uptime. Thankfully, all of iPage’s support channels are 24/7 and manned by quick-responding and helpful representatives. However, those that prefer to solve a problem themselves also have a superb knowledge base to depend on.

VPS and dedicated server customers get technical support for the unique problems these customers might face. Without premium support packages, every iPage customer can expect the same level of service. Unfortunately, iPage doesn’t handle website migrations, so this is one thing you’ll need to do yourself. However, their support staff will still help you with any problems you face in doing so.

24/7 Live Chat Support

As most people’s preferred method to contact support, it’s great that live chat is available 24/7. In most cases, we managed to get connected with a support agent in under 5 minutes. iPage has fantastic live chat support, and you’ll be promptly attended to even during peak times, weekends, or public holidays. We’ve also found the support staff to be accommodating and competent.

24/7 Phone Support

iPage’s phone support is almost just as good as live chat support. It’s 24/7, which is pretty rare for hosting providers where this type of service is reserved only for top-tier customers. Waiting times might be slightly longer than for live chat, but that’s to be expected.

Knowledgebase and Tutorials

The knowledge base and support center is always within easy reach with a Help button throughout the dashboard. iPage has very helpful and extensive documentation that covers everything from accounts to security to CGI and scripting. Categories are neatly organized, and you can also search for specific topics. If you need help with certain aspects of hosting, there are also video tutorials that take you through some important hosting processes.

Phone Support

iPage offer 24/7 phone customer support.

Support Tickets

iPage offers ticketed support, which can be accessed via the Control Panel.

Live Chat

iPage offers outsourced live chat support. However technical support is limited.

Premium Support

iPage does not offer a specialized technical support channel for specific hosting platforms or problems.

Community Forums

iPage does not have a dedicated community forum for customer support and troubleshooting.

Tutorials & Guides

iPage does not offer customer support via technical, articles, guides or videos.

Multilingual Support

iPage does not mention offering customer support across multiple languages.

Website Migration

iPage does not offer free or paid website migration support for any plans.

Coupons

Get upto 60%OFF WordPress Hosting

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We’ve curated the best possible features to optimize your new WordPress site: hand-selected themes, pre-installed plugins, and even a fully customized WordPress control panel.

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Get upto 20%OFF VPS Hosting

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With optional root access, you’ll be able to customize your hosting environment, as well as install proprietary software or other applications.

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Get 75%OFF Shared Hosting with Ipage

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Our one-size-fits-all hosting plan will meet your online needs at an amazing value.

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Get 20%OFF Dedicated Hosting Plans

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With an unrestricted ability to install software and an easy-to-use control panel, you’ll have complete control over your hosting environment

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