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

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Josep Garcia

Josep Garcia

Author

Cai Ellis

Cai Ellis

Researcher

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iPage has been around since 1998 and seem to power over 1 million sites. Just like Bluehost and HostGator, it’s part of the Endurance International Group (EIG) - a massive internet service provider.

EIG products aren’t at the top of my list when I have to recommend web hosting providers, as their performance isn’t always the best and they tend to miss important features.

However, iPage’s affordable prices caught my eye, so I decided to test them and write this iPage review.

Let’s check out what iPage has to offer.

But if you rather watch our video review to understand what iPage has to offer, go ahead:

iPage Hosting Review – Cheap Doesn’t Mean It’s Worth It!

What Products Does iPage Offer?

iPage shared hosting plans are very popular, but this isn’t all they offer. Let me walk you through all their hosting-related services:

It’s possible to purchase domain names directly from iPage. Domain name prices vary. Their price for a .com domain name the first year is $9.99, after renewal, it will cost you $19.99. They have dozens of domain name extensions available, even some unusual ones like .coach or .bargains.

Their shared hosting packages are very popular, and their first-term prices make it very attractive for those looking for cheap web hosting. This type of hosting is called shared because you share a server (and its resources) with other customers. After renewal, a 12 month plan costs $8.99 per month, not super cheap.

They also have a shared hosting optimized for WordPress. With this WordPress hosting, they try to appeal to WordPress site owners. To be honest, besides having WordPress and some plugins pre-installed, I am not sure what the advantages of this plan are. The renewal prices for the basic iPage WordPress hosting plan is $9.99 a month. There are much better cheap WordPress hosting providers out there.

With VPS hosting service, you can customize your service to your specific technology needs (e.g. use an uncommon programming language). Check out one of the iPage VPS plans. They start at around $23 a month.

Finally, for those needing more resources or hosting really big sites, iPage also has dedicated servers you can use - basically, you have a whole server for yourself. However, they do get quite pricey, as dedicated hosting plans start at around $140 per month at iPage.

But what I really wanted to check out was their shared hosting services, so from now on I will only make reference to those in this iPage review.

iPage Pricing

$8.99

iPage 1 year

$8.99

iPage 2 years

$8.35

iPage 3 years

What Do Their Shared Plans Include?

12 months 24 months 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

Max. inode count

(similar to number of files)

200,000 200,000 200,000
Storage Unlimited

(with a normal operation policy)

Unlimited

(with a normal operation policy)

Unlimited

(with a normal operation policy)

Database

Max. DB size

Unlimited

3GB or 1000 tables

Unlimited

3GB or 1000 tables

Unlimited

3GB or 1000 tables

Backup Paid separately Paid separately Paid separately
First-term prices $2.99 a month $2.49 a month $1.99 a month
Renewal price $8.99 a month $8.99 a month $8.35 a month

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!

ipage upsells purchase process

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

  • Pros
  • Cons

Pros

  • Very cheap first term

    The first term with iPage is cheap as chips.

  • Simple plan structure

    They only have 1 plan so you won’t get confused with different plans and features.

  • Modern-looking panel

    Although it’s not the easiest to use, the iPage dashboard looks good and it’s mostly fairly intuitive.

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

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

Ease of Use

Finding information about their pricing, features and hosting service limitations isn’t easy. The registration process is also confusing as they offer many unnecessary add-ons and try to sign you up for the longest period (36 months). The control panel is not cPanel based and looks modern, but it’s not the easiest to use though.

Domain Names

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 it’ll cost you $19.99.

Email Rating

Email accounts are unlimited. However, each of your accounts can’t have more than 500 MB or hold more than 10,000 emails – whichever comes first. *

Databases

You can create unlimited MySQL databases, the maximum database queries are 75,000 per hour. Each database can’t be larger than 2 GB or 1,000 tables. *

Applications

They only have 1-click installations for WordPress, if you’re using another CMS (eg Joomla or Drupal), you’ll have to install them manually, that can be a pain.

Webspace Limit

iPage comes with unlimited disk space. However, they have an ‘Acceptable Use Policy’. For example, some projects that typically require a lot of web space (e.g. cloud backup storage for your HD pictures) aren’t allowed. *

Monthly Data Transfer Limit

They claim that they can cope with 99.5% of the user’s needs, however, you may be encouraged to move to a VPS if you get too much traffic – they don’t state how much.

FTP Accounts and Secure FTP

Create as many FTP accounts as you need. You can connect to your site using FTP or SFTP but no SSH access available.

Server Location

They only have data centers in the US: Boston and Waltham.

Security Features

Free SSL is included and PHP 7.4 allowed, which make your site more secure. If you want additional security features (e.g. malware scan), you need to purchase this separately at an extra $20 per year. Sadly, it doesn’t include multi-factor authentication.

Server Speed

PHP 8, which is faster, is not 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 are not using SSD drives – all these have a negative impact on speed. In our web host speed tests, I find that iPage is consistently one of the slowest providers.

Uptime

Their uptime score in our web host reliability tests is very poor. In fact, they are consistently one of the worst-performing providers!

Backups

You will be forced to purchase their Site Backup Tool add-on, starting at around $31 a year for each website.

CDN

Even if iPage don’t offer a CDN themselves, you could connect an external CDN provider like CloudFlare.

Server Features

It’s a Linux based shared hosting with MySQL 5 and PHP 5 & 7 support. It’s possible to also use other programming languages like Python and Perl. They don’t have an integrated caching system, and with their shared hosting, GIT repositories aren’t allowed either. Finally, their servers don’t seem to be PCI Compliant out-of-the-box.

Refunds and Guarantees

They offer a 30-day money-back policy, but there does not seem to be a Service Level Agreement (e.g. for uptime).

Assistance and Support

It’s very difficult 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.

Overall Rating

2.9

iPage offers a great first-term deal, but the renewal won’t be cheap at $8.99 per month. This is super expensive if we take into account the limited backups, poor support and their low performance. Other providers offer a lot more.

* 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.

Web Hosts: Page Load Times

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.

2020 2021 2022
Page Load Time in Seconds
GreenGeeks 2.39 1.56 1.29
A2 Hosting 3.15 2.01 1.30
GoDaddy 3.40 1.94 1.44
Cloudways 2.32 1.73 1.46
SiteGround 2.14 1.54 1.56
Hostinger 4.19 1.61 1.63
WP Engine 2.21 1.65 1.66
Namecheap 1.60 1.69
Dreamhost 3.28 1.84 1.75
Kinsta 2.98 1.77 1.82
Bluehost 3.07 2.87 2.07
IONOS 1.95 2.32
InMotion 4.36 2.75 2.58
iPage 4.19 2.76 2.60
HostGator 3.77 2.78 2.72

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:

Web Hosts: Uptime

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:

2020 2021 2022
Uptime %
SiteGround 99.97 100 100
WP Engine 99.99 99.99 100
Namecheap 100 100
Kinsta 100 100 100
InMotion 99.73 99.95 100
A2 Hosting 99.99 99.98 99.99
Cloudways 100 100 99.99
HostGator 99.91 99.99 99.98
GreenGeeks 99.98 99.98 99.97
GoDaddy 99.90 99.96 99.95
Hostinger 99.48 99.92 99.95
Bluehost 99.96 99.99 99.95
iPage 98.45 99.85 99.95
Dreamhost 99.99 99.96 99.83
IONOS 99.93 99.71

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

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.

The authors

Learn more about us

Josep Garcia

Content Manager

Hi there, I am Josep Garcia. Since 2014 I've been testing and writing about website builders and hosting services, and I share all my learnings at Tooltester.com. Today I am not an active staff member anymore, but I do hope you enjoyed this article. And if you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.

Cai Ellis

SEO Manager

Hi! My name is Cai. Over the years, I've used countless hosting providers, built innumerable ecommerce stores and picked up a bit of SEO know-how too. If you've got questions about these or any related subjects, I'll be happy to help!

Learn more about us

We keep our content up to date

08 Sep 2021: Performance and general update
08 Oct 2020: General update and new prices
23 Jun 2020: New backend
8 Jul 2019: First review

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This article has been written and researched following a precise methodology.

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