iPage web hosting review

iPage is a budget web hosting company with close to 25 years in the business, and more than a million https://bloggingjoy.com/black-friday/best-black-friday-web-hosting-deals/ websites on its platform. iPage is owned and run by Newfold Digital (formerly known as Endurance International Group), the company who also owns big-name hosting competitors like Bluehost and HostGator.

WordPress hosting plans include extra features to optimize WordPress speed and security. iPage doesn’t offer more powerful VPS, dedicated or cloud server products, making it unsuitable for large business sites, or any web projects where speed and reliability are important.

Next, we’ll break down the various iPage products, find out what they have to offer, and whether they could work for you.

iPage shared hosting
Shared hosting is a technology where several websites are hosted on the same physical server. This keeps prices low because the cost of the server is spread across many accounts. But the websites also share the same CPU, RAM and network connections, and if the sites get busy, that means everyone takes a big performance hit.

iPage’s shared hosting is as simple as it gets, with just one plan. It’s seriously cheap at $1.99 a month over three years ($7.99 on renewal), but still has a reasonable feature list. There are no storage or bandwidth limits, for instance. The plan allows you to host unlimited websites (a welcome touch, as most plans at this price only support one). There’s a free domain, free SSL, a bundled website builder, 1-click WordPress installation, unlimited email addresses and more.

That’s reasonable for $1.99 a month, but there are some issues here. The plan doesn’t offer backups, for instance, and it costs from $2.27 a month to add them, more than doubling the price. There’s no free migration, and your hosting management tools are below par. iPage uses a horribly basic 1-click WordPress installer, for example, which doesn’t begin to match the top-notch Softaculous installer often used elsewhere. And its own control panel, where you’ll create email accounts, work with files and more, is short on features and awkward to use.

There are potential setup complications, too. Sign up and the website insists you register a new domain or transfer an existing domain to iPage; unlike almost all the competition, there’s no option to use a domain managed elsewhere. We asked support, they said this was possible but they’d have to manually create the account for us (a hassle, and not an option most users would even realize existed.)

Compare all this with Hostinger. It’s a very similar price (from $2.99 a month over four years, $6.99 on renewal), but includes backups, offers a free WordPress migration, has a far better WordPress installer and control panel, and was much faster in our tests (more on that, later). Hostinger is a far better choice for budget shared hosting, but if you need extra power and are happy to pay for it, our Best Shared Web Hosting guide has more ideas.’