iPage Review
Top Five Advisor has recognized iPage as the web hosting provider of choice for anyone looking for the cheapest web hosting service available. An excellent choice for web hosting services for those that need web hosting on a seriously restrained budget.
We’ve received numerous emails asking us what the cheapest solution is for their simple family blog or hobby website and without a doubt, iPage is always the company we recommend. We recommend iPage as a launching point for webmasters who will typically upgrade to a business-class web hosting after their sites get established and earning money.
iPage Pros
iPage offers unlimited everything web hosting including unlimited disk space, bandwidth, emails, online stores and much more. iPage is the cheapest hosting you’ll find.iPage Cons
In order to turn a profit on web hosting, iPage will need to excessively load many people on a single server. This may cause reliability and performance issues. We recommend staying with iPage to establish your site then consider upgrading later.The Ultimate in Discount Hosting
We at Top Five Advisor love recommending iPage to brand new webmasters looking to start their first website. The reason is the pricing plans made available are the cheapest we’ve seen which is a good thing for those starting out on a severely limited budget and for those who just want to try their hand at being a website owner.
iPage has been around for well over 10 years now and hosts more than one million customers and because each customer can host multiple websites, you can imagine how many millions of actual websites are hosted on their service.
Is iPage Discount Hosting Right for Me?
If you are a new webmaster or want to place a lower traffic website online for the cheapest possible price, yes, iPage is the perfect choice. They offer a massive amount of features and benefits that will help you start your website and even offer promotional and marketing discounts that you can use to start driving traffic to your website after it is ready to go live.
Do we recommend our clients start on iPage? If our clients decide that the price is the most important factor holding them back from starting their website, we will go ahead and start them on iPage and give them a strategy to build their website, start driving traffic, start building their content and ultimately, get them on a more quality web host like InMotion Hosting, SiteGround or Bluehost. Of course, if they start making more money from their site, we’ll recommend a VPS Hosting plan to take their site to the next level of reliability and performance.
However, all these hosts are way more expensive to someone on an extremely low budget which is why we’d always recommend to them to go ahead and start with iPage and then work their way to a better host after they start earning an income online.
The Ordering Process
iPage is the king of upsells. On the second page after entering the domain name you want to use or after requesting iPage register a domain for you, you’ll get taken to the second page where they offer over 6 upsells.
WP Essential: This adds $3/mo to your price and adds WordPress features including WordPress installation if needed. We explain this package in further detail under the iPage WordPress Hosting section below if interested.
Constant Contact: This is an email marketing service provider for which we have many reviews. The cost for Constant Contact is $15/mo when registered through iPage. Currently, Constant Contact is our bronze medal winner. See our Aweber review and GetResponse review for other email marketing solutions that we’ve ranked higher.
Advanced Site Protection: $1.66/mo. Here’s the secret. It is in the web hosts’ best interest to keep malware off of customer’s websites and therefore, there is already going to be malware and threat scanning included on any web host you choose including iPage.
Google Apps: $5/mo. If you are interested in getting Google Apps with a professional Gmail that uses your domain name, you can always sign up to the service later.
Protect Your Site: $1.08/mo which adds automated daily backups available in your control panel. Another little known secret, all hosts backup their client’s data usually on a daily basis already to protect themselves and their customers from hardware failure. This is not needed unless you want your backups readily available.
Mobile Phone Mobile Website: $2.99/mo this is absolutely not needed. Choose a website template or WordPress theme that is mobile responsive (responds when your browser window is shrink inward). If you do that, this mobile phone feature is a waste of money and is redundant.
Domain Privacy: Look carefully under “Purchase Information” for a tiny checkbox for domain privacy if you elected to have iPage register your domain for you. You do not need privacy, all this does is protect your information from the domain registry and is not needed. If you are using a domain name you already purchased, you won’t see this check box.
iPage Plans
This section has been completely updated because iPage changed from a one-plan-fits-all approach to offering multiple upgrades and plans to tailor their hosting to whatever needs a customer might have.
The Main iPage Essential Plan
Over the 4 years we’ve reviewed iPage, the pricing has ranged anywhere from $1.89 to $2.25 depending on the holiday. No matter what the price is, it’s a huge bargain because it allows you to host unlimited domains including access to “scalable unlimited” disk space and bandwidth.
What this means is that you will have no restrictions on the disk space and bandwidth that you use, however, it isn’t open to abuse. According to their usage policies, 99.95% of all customers will have more than enough bandwidth and space available for their websites, however, the 0.05% of abusers who use a massive amount of resources and space will be asked to make changes or change web hosts.
Other benefits include $100 in Google AdWords and $100 in Yahoo!/Bing advertising, a website builder for up to 6 pages (optional), a free domain name for the first year ($14.99 is charged if you claim the money back guarantee in 30 days), 500MB of email storage access, access to free shopping cart scripts and a free 1GB cloud storage account.
The main plan also includes easy installation access of popular free scripts like WordPress and Joomla as well. In the control panel as shown above, you can find “SimpleScripts” to install hundreds of the most popular free software or you can use the WordPress button as shown to install WordPress on your domain.
iPage WordPress Hosting
As we show you above in the Ordering Process section, iPage offers a package called WP Essential as an upsell which allows for additional WordPress enhancements such as pre-installed WordPress themes, plugins and more.
WP Starter: We recommend ignoring this plan and just use the basic web hosting plan. You won’t need the customized WordPress dashboard, you can easily install the plugins made available for free and you can get free WordPress themes from within your WordPress dashboard as well. Save your money.
WP Essential: This is a $3/mo upgrade on the standard iPage plan. This option stands out because it upgrades the server you are placed on by default to a SSD-based infrastructure designed for maximized uptime and server performance. You’ll also get personalized customer support by WordPress experts if needed.
For the most part, if you are looking for a budget host which is the primary reason you’ve read this far already, these packages shouldn’t interest you until you are ready to upgrade your website. InMotion Hosting offers SSD for free and WP Engine offers awesome WordPress hosting starting at $29/mo as well.
Money Back Guarantee
iPage recently reduced the advertising on iPage to show a 30-day money back guarantee versus their previous “Anytime Money Back Guarantee” that they advertised previously which offered a way to get a prorated refund on the prepaid balance remaining if you need to switch web hosts after your first 30 days.
Again, as we’ve said earlier, we recommend joining for the one year term. That way, should you decide to upgrade your web hosting later, for whatever reason, you won’t be out that much money considering their ultimate discounted price for new customers. This is limiting your risk while taking advantage of this amazing resource to get your site online and accepting content.
Customer Support
Tired of customer service by people you can barely understand? With iPage, they do offer 24×7 American phone support according to their website which is a huge plus from many years ago when a big complaint from their customers was foreigner support.
As a customer, once you are logged in, you will have access to their support console where you can click a blue link to Make a New Request which will create a new support ticket in their system.
Access their Knowledgebase area to over 15 categories to choose from including information on building your website, getting started, account help and WordPress help as well.
Have a look at their User Guides section as well. This guide will help you with several beginner topics including web design, domain management, understanding web hosting and how to setup your own eCommerce store. This is a really nice guide and organized to help you get started as fast as possible.
As for actual customer support, you will have ready access to:
- Live chat.
- Toll free sales and customer support telephone numbers.
- Ticket system.
- Knowledgebase.
Your Turn!
We at TopFiveAdvisor want to hear about your experiences with iPage. Be sure to leave your review of iPage below to let us know how iPage has worked for you. Did you take our advice and use their service for the ultimate cheap hosting option with plans to upgrade? How did the process go for you?