iPage Review: Is It The Best Choice for Your Site?

iPage Pricing

What Do Their Shared Plans Include?

iPage offers a different concept with their shared hosting plans. They only have 1 package where all the features are included. This simplifies the choice a lot as you don’t have to pick between one hosting tier and another depending on the options you require.

Unlike other EIG products like HostGator, they don’t offer monthly plans. You can choose from 1, 2 and 3-year deals. But to be honest, there isn’t much of a difference with the pricing. In the past they’ve offered bigger discounts for longer deals.

One thing to note is that, with iPage, ‘unlimited’ usually comes with a whole list of clauses/exceptions. For example, they set an inode count for the number of files you can have (e.g. databases, emails, images, etc.).

As we’ll see later, their hosting services fall a bit short (e.g. poor backup system), so during the purchase process, some add-ons are pushed into your checkout basket (see image below) – sneaky!

On top of that, iPage will by default suggest you purchase their services for 3 years, the longest deal they offer. Make sure you check that before you pay.

And of course, make sure you are OK with the renewal prices (see table above) as the fees increase a lot after the first term.

Pros and Cons

When to use iPage Hosting?

It’s hard for me to widely recommend iPage due to its low performance and missing features (more on this below). But, if you want a 3-year cheap hosting service for a personal project, iPage could be a good option.

I guess it’s also a good option for students who don’t have a big budget and need a (first-term) affordable hosting provider. But still, other solutions like DreamHost offer similar pricing and much better performance.

When not to use iPage Hosting?

I would discourage anyone with a serious online project to go with iPage. I think their poor performance could be an issue for their user experience and SEO. On top of that, their slow support can be beyond frustrating when having hosting-related issues.

Ipage backup addon

Since there aren’t any backup features, you’ll be forced to purchase its backup add-on. I am sure you’ll need to restore to a previous version of your site at some point (e.g. if a plugin update crashes your site).

Like many other competitors, iPage doesn’t offer Windows-based hosting, check out InMotion Hosting or GoDaddy if you need one.

Finally, avid developers and teams won’t like their lack of SSH access, staging area and server-side caching system.

iPage Shared Hosting Details

* Even if iPage doesn’t have specific limitations (e.g. for storage), all your combined  files can’t be more than 200.000.

iPage Performance Tests

If you are considering using iPage, you probably want to know how good (or bad) it performs. For that, I monitor their performance regularly and I intensively checked their speed and uptime.

Is iPage speed good?

Not really. I benchmarked iPage’s speed against 12 other providers and they were one of the slowest hosting service for each test. Pretty disappointing.

iPage averaged a loading time of 2.60 seconds, way worse than the top-performing hosting provider (GreenGeeks), which had an average loading time of 1.29 seconds.

And as you can see in the table below, iPage has consistently been one of the slowest web hosts for the last three years.

Results in seconds

Having a slow website could punish your SEO rankings as search engines dislike slow loading sites. Of course, your visitors will dislike this too.

There are things you can do yourself to try to fix a slow website and even speed up WordPress, but you won’t get very far if your web host is slow.

Check out our guide to the fastest and most reliable web hosts for more information.

Is iPage’s Uptime Good?

You can think of uptime as a way to measure your site’s (server) availability. Believe it or not, most hosting providers can’t ensure that your site will be 100% of the time online – e.g. for maintenance reasons.

An uptime of 99.95% or higher is considered a good result. Lower rates could harm, again, your SEO rankings and user experience. No one likes a website that’s always down.

The good news is that iPage’s uptime is better than their speed. At 99.95%, it is just good rather than great:

But you can see in the table below that iPage has consistently improved their uptime over the last three years, so they are definitely moving in the right direction:

To monitor uptime I use StatusCake, a tool that checks each website every 5 minutes.

iPage Review: Do I Recommend It?

If you have a hosting dependent project (e.g. ecommerce or popular blogs), I would absolutely recommend that you look for a more solid alternative. Their poor performance could harm your project.

On top of that, their support is something they could improve too as it’s slow at times and you don’t always get the answer you were hoping for. Their steep renewal prices, constant upgrade suggestions and extremely overpriced backup-restore fees may be a dealbreaker for some too.

iPage is also missing too many features for serious users (e.g. developers). For example, their backup options are pretty useless unless you get their (paid) add-on. Other functions you may miss are SSH access, staging areas or a server-side caching system.

But if you were looking for a hosting service that’s very cheap (for the first-term) then iPage could be a good match… provided you don’t mind the low performance and iffy support you’d get.

> Try iPage 30 days for free or check out our other guide to the best web hosting companies.

iPage Alternatives

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After reading this iPage review you are probably concerned about their service and want some alternative recommendations.

Let me list you a few so you can decide on the one that fits your project best:

• In my opinion, A2 Hosting and DreamHost offer solid performance at a fair price.
• I had good support experiences with SiteGround, DreamHost and InMotion.
• DreamHost and SiteGround offer the highest performance (uptime + speed).
• For WordPress sites, I think SiteGround can be the best match. They have a bunch of useful features (e.g. staging and speed optimization) that will make your life easier.

But if you still want to give iPage a try, remember that you have a 30-day money-back warranty.