iPage has been around since 1998 and seems to be able to over 1 million sites. Like Bluehost and HostGator, it is part of the Endurance International Group (EIG), a massive internet service provider.
EIG products are not at the top of my list when recommending hosting providers as their performance is not always the best, and they tend to miss out on essential features.
However, iPage’s affordable prices caught my attention, so I decided to give them a try and write this iPage review.
Let’s take a look at what iPage has to offer.
What Products does iPage Hosting offer?
iPage shared hosting plans are top-rated, but that’s not all they offer. Let me walk you through all their hosting-related services:
It is possible to buy domain names directly from iPage. Your price for a .com domain name for the first year is $9.99; after renewal, it will cost you $17.99.
They have dozens of domain name extensions, including unusual ones like .coach or .bargains.
Their shared hosting packages are very popular, and their first-term prices make them attractive to some. This type of hosting is shared because it shares a server (and its resources) with other clients.
After renewal, a 12-month plan is $8.99 per month, which is not very cheap.
They also have shared hosting optimized for WordPress. With this WordPress hosting, they try to attract WordPress site owners.
Apart from having WordPress and some plugins pre-installed, I’m not sure what the advantages of this plan are.
The renewal price for iPage’s basic WordPress hosting plan is $9.49 monthly.
But if you need a hosting service that you can customize to your technology needs (for example, use an unusual programming language), you can check out one of the iPage VPS plans.
They start at around $25 per month.
Finally, for those who need more resources or host really big sites, iPage also has dedicated servers that you can use. You have a whole server to yourself.
However, they get expensive, with dedicated hosting plans starting at around $140 per month on iPage.
- 12 Months
- 24 months
- Title
| 12 Months | 24 months | Title | |
| $2.99 a month | $2.49 a month | 36 months | |
| Websites | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Allowed domains | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Support | 24 hours Phone, chat and email | 24 hours Phone, chat and email | 24 hours Phone, chat and email |
| Maximum inode count (similar to number of files) | 200,000 | 200,000 | 200,000 |
| Storage | Unlimited (with a normal operating policy) | Unlimited (with a normal operating policy) | Unlimited (with a normal operating policy) |
| Database Max Size.DB | Unlimited 3 GB or 1000 Tables | Unlimited 3 GB or 1000 Tables | Unlimited 3 GB or 1000 Tables |
| Backup | Paid separately | Paid separately | Paid separately |
| Renewal Price | $8.99 a Month | $8.99 a Month | $8.35 a month |
| Learn More | Learn More | Learn More |
iPage offers a different concept with its shared hosting plans. They
only have one package where all the features are included. It greatly simplifies the choice since you do not have to choose between one level of hosting and another depending on the options you need.
Unlike other EIG products like HostGator, they do not offer monthly plans. You can choose from 1, 2, and 3-year offers. But to be honest, there is not much difference in the prices. In the past, they have offered more significant discounts for longer deals.
One thing to note is that, with iPage, ‘unlimited’ usually comes with a complete 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 will see later, their hosting services fall a bit short (e.g., poor backup system), so during the checkout process, some plugins are inserted into your checkout basket (see image below). Below), sneaks!
On top of that, iPage will, by default, suggest you buy their services for three years, the most extended offer they offer. Make sure to check it before you pay.
As I’ve mentioned, there are quite a few shady things about their pricing, but the one that annoys me the most is having to pay $100 when you ask them to restore your website from one of their backups.
And of course, make sure you agree to the renewal prices as rates go up a lot after the first term.
iPage Pros & Cons
Let me quickly tell you what I think are the most important pros and cons of shared iPage hosting:
Pros
- Very Cheap First Term: First term with iPage is cheap as chips
- Simple plan structure : They only have 1 plan, so you won’t be confused by different plans and features.
- Modern looking Panel : Although not the easiest to use, iPage’s control panel looks good and is mostly quite intuitive.
Cons
- High prices on renewal: iPage will cost you approximately 3 times more after renewal
- Aggressive upselling – Their checkout process and back-end are littered with upgrade suggestions and add-ons that you may not want.
- Poor performance – Unfortunately, iPage is one of the lowest performing hosting providers I’ve tried.
- Poor Backups – If you need to backup your website, you will need to purchase the backup plugin
- Support could be better: In my experience, your support could have been more helpful and quicker.
But you may be wondering when it is recommended to use iPage.
When to use iPage Hosting?
It’s hard for me to highly recommend iPage due to its poor performance and missing features (more on below). But, if you want a cheap 3-year hosting service for a personal project, iPage might be a good option.
I guess it’s also a good option for students who don’t have a big budget and need an affordable (first term) hosting provider. But still, other solutions like DreamHost offer similar prices and much better performance.
When not to use iPage?
I would advise anyone with a severe online project to go with iPage. Its poor performance could be a problem for its user experience and SEO. On top of that, their slow support can be frustrating when you have hosting-related issues.
Since there is no backup feature, you will be forced to purchase their backup plugin. I’m sure you’ll need to roll back to a previous version of your site at some point (for example, if a plugin update crashes your site).
Finally, avid developers and teams won’t like its lack of SSH access, staging area, and server-side caching.
iPage Shared Hosting Details
Finding information about the hosting service’s prices, features and limitations is not accessible. The registration process is also confusing as they offer many unnecessary add-ons and try to sign you up for the most extended period (36 months).
The control panel is not based on cPanel and looks modern. However, it is not the easiest to use.iPage will allow you to have as many domain names connected to your account as you need. They also offer a free domain name for the first year, after which it will cost you $17.99.
Email accounts are unlimited. However, each account cannot be larger than 500MB or contain more than 10,000 emails, whichever comes first. *
You can create unlimited MySQL databases; the maximum number of database queries is 75,000 per hour. Each database cannot be larger than 3 GB or 1,000 tables. *
They only have 1-click installs for WordPress; if you use another CMS, you will have to install them manually, which can be a pain.
iPage comes with unlimited disk space. They do, however, have an “Acceptable Use Policy.” For example, some projects generally require a lot of web space (e.g., cloud backup storage for your HD images) are not allowed. *
They claim they can address 99.5% of user needs. However, you may be encouraged to move to a VPS if you get too much traffic – they don’t state how much.
Create as many FTP accounts as you need. You can connect to your site using FTP or SFTP, but SSH access is unavailable.
They only have data centers in the US: Boston and Waltham.
Free SSL is included, and PHP 7.3 is allowed, making your site more secure. If you want additional security features (for example, malware scanning), you must purchase this separately at an extra $20 per year. Unfortunately, it does not include multi-factor authentication.
PHP 7, which is faster, is allowed. However, they don’t offer HTTP/2; they don’t have a server-side caching system, and (as far as I can tell) they aren’t using SSD drives, which hurt speed. In our tests, I found that iPage was one of the slowest providers we tested.
Its uptime score in our tests is inferior. They were the worst-performing provider.
You will be forced to purchase their site backup tool add-on starting at around $15 a year for each website.
Even if iPage doesn’t offer a CDN, they could connect to a third-party CDN provider like Cloudflare.
It is a shared hosting based on Linux with support for MySQL 5 and PHP 7. Using other programming languages such as Python and Perl is also possible. They don’t have a built-in caching system, and GIT repositories are also not allowed with their shared Hosting. Finally, your servers don’t seem to be PCI compliant out of the box.
They offer a 30-day money-back policy, but there doesn’t seem to be a service-level agreement (e.g., for uptime).
It isn’t easy to find the answers to your questions. Support can be contacted via phone, chat, and ticket system (email). In my experience, they don’t always have the most helpful support team.
* Even if iPage has no specific limitations (for example, for storage), all of its files combined cannot be more than 200,000.
iPage performance tests
If you’re considering using iPage, you probably want to know how good (or bad) it works. I regularly monitor its performance and intensively review its speed and uptime.
Is iPage speed good?
The truth is, no.
I compared iPage’s speed against 12 other providers, and they were one of the slowest hosting services for every test. Pretty disappointing.
| Test | average charging time |
| GTmetrix 5 test | 3,90 s |
| 5 Pingdom test | 1,60 s |
| 5 PageSpeed Insights (Google) | 5,20 s |
These tests were
carried out under the same circumstances (for example, the same page and content) for five weeks.
iPage averaged a load time of 3.57 seconds, much worse than the best performing hosting provider (SiteGround), which had an average load time of 2.10 seconds.
A slow website could punish your SEO rankings as search engines don’t like slow-loading sites. Of course, your visitors will not like this too.
Is iPage uptime good?
You can think of uptime as a way to measure the availability of your site (server). Believe it or not, most hosting providers cannot guarantee that your site will be online 100% of the time for maintenance reasons.
An uptime of 99.95% or more is considered a good result. Lower rates could again hurt your SEO rankings and user experience. Nobody likes a website that is always down.
I wish I could give you better news, but iPage’s uptime is even worse than its speed.
| 2019 (Percentage) | 2020 (Percentage) | |
| Kinsta (3 month trial) | No data | 100 |
| Cloudways (3 month trial) | No data | 100 |
| DreamHost | 100 | 99.99 |
| Accommodation A2 | 99.93 | 99.99 |
| Motor WP | No data | 99.99 |
| GreenGeeks (3 month trial) | No data | 99.98 |
| SitioGround | 99.98 | 99.97 |
| Bluehost | 99.98 | 99.96 |
| HostGator | 99.94 | 99.91 |
| GoDaddy | 99.97 | 99.9 |
| InMotion | 99.97 | 99.73 |
| Hostinger | 99.62 | 99.48 |
| iPage | 99.66 | 98.45 |
To monitor uptime, I use StatusCake, a tool that checks every website every 5 minutes.
As you can see from the table above, their availability was a long way from the 99.95% mark that you should strive for as a website owner. Not ideal for serious site owners.
iPage Hosting Review: Do I Recommend It?
If you have a project dependent on hosting (e.g., eCommerce or popular blogs), I recommend looking for a more robust alternative. Its poor performance could damage your project.
On top of that, their support is something they could also improve on, as it’s sometimes slow, and you don’t always get the response you expected. Its high renewal prices, constant upgrade suggestions, and costly backup and restore fees may also be a deal breaker for some.
iPage also lacks too many features for severe users (e.g., developers). For example, their backup options are useless unless you get their (paid) plugin. Other features you may lose are SSH access, staging areas, or a server-side caching system.
But if you were looking for a hosting service that is very cheap (for the first time), then iPage could be a good match… as long as you don’t mind the poor performance and support, you would get.
Alternatives Web Hosting iPage
After reading this iPage review, you probably worry about their service and want some alternative recommendations.
Let me list a few for you so you can decide which one best suits your project:
- 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 may be the best match. They have a lot of useful features (e.g., staging and speed optimization) that will make your life easier.
But if you still want to try iPage, remember that you have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
