iPage is relatively well known in the hosting realm – particularly for its budget hosting offerings. iPage is five-stars rated and was selected as the best budget hosting option for 2013/2014. Although hostingadvice.com gives 4.9 stars and in 6th position in 2017. This means iPage is going backwards in the game.
That said, as is the case with any hosting provider, there are pros and cons to the iPage service. iPage is somewhat a case of “you get what you pay for” – after all, you can’t expect premium hosting services and support when you are paying just pennies for the service.
I have been hosing websites on iPage over 5 Years and I can clearly notice that iPage is going good to worse, In this post I will share my personal experience which I faced with iPage recently. I hope this review will help you make your own decision.
Average Live chat waiting time is hours (Ages) sometimes never.
iPage used to be one of my favorite hosting site, as I have used several other hosting providers such as HostGator, SiteGround, Godaddy and some other local resellers. iPage live chat was always active and can connect to an agent in few seconds.
But not it takes hours to connect to an agent, and most cases I was never able to contact an agent even after 2 – 3 hours. (true story)
Just imagine one of your client website is down and you do not know what to do, the only option is to contact the customer support via live chat, but you had to wait for 3 good hours. And yes you get your first super frustrated client.
According to iPage’s support statement, the service offers 24/7 support services and can be contacted via phone, live chat, or email – sounds great, right? Well a customer from India won’t have the facility to give you a call L.
Customer Support is not Exactly the World’s Best.
Let’s say you are blessed to contact the customer Angel (sorry its Agent), then you had to deal with explaining things in super detail as they do not understand anything at all, and they take some extra minutes to reply (could be having coffee). Finally, I had to waste some hours and end up with no proper solution.
And yes, I had to give a 0 ratings with some bad comment. Seriously why?
Below Average Uptime and page loading time
While iPage’s pricing is among the cheapest we’ve seen, their uptime (similarly to HostGator) is among the lowest we’ve seen too. That’s not good. [ Says hostingfacts.com ]
Their average uptime of 99.77% over the past twelve months is significantly lower than many of the other web hosts we’ve reviewed to date.
iPage’s page loading times came in at 1038ms, making it about 48% slower than competition’s average of 700ms. One month, they even hit over 2,000ms!
That’s almost absurdly bad, especially when some of the best web hosts we’ve reviewed regularly deliver page loading speeds of under 500ms.
This is a serious issue with regards to SEO, Google will does not recommend sites if it takes over 1 second to load. This will lead to lower ranking of your beloved site.
| PAGE HOSTING | LAST 12 MONTHS |
| UPTIME: | 99.77% |
| AVG. LOAD TIME: | 1038ms |
| PRICE: | $1.99/mo |
| USER REVIEWS: | 58% negative, 42% positive |
| OVERALL RATING: | 25th out of 30 |
Inexpensive Hosting but Super Expensive Renewal Cost
iPage offers an incredibly budget friendly plan advertised at just $1.89 per month – however, that deal is only available to first-time clients, meaning that once your initial service is up, you are forced to sign at a higher monthly rate to continue your service. In the case of iPage, your rate will jump to around $8.99 per month when you renew your hosting plan – not exactly the incredible deal that draws customers in, but in many cases, clients get “stuck” because of the hassle to find a new hosting provider and make the switch.
Well that’s a devil deal isn’t it?
No cPanel but complicated control panel
Every single website I used has the famous user friendly cPanel, except iPage.
Instead, they go with lesser known cPanel alternative vDeck, this is an issue for a webmaster, which limits the flexibility and speed of managing the websites.
Now the important question, Do I recommend iPage?
Now the important question, Do I recommend iPage?Well I do not have a straight punch answer, I still love the old sexy iPage.
iPage is cheap and good for small scale websites, considering their worst customer support and terrible uptime. I do not recommend iPage for a large-scale sites. (Considering the fact, you are my close friend)
