iPage IntroductioniPage is a web ho

iPage Introduction
iPage is a web hosting company that specialises in shared hosting plans. They offer a range of freebies and bonuses on signup, and an unusual ‘Anytime’ money-back guarantee. Both of these seem to be their specialist area, along with shared web hosting.

The company have been providing website hosting since 1998, and they currently have one and a half million domains on their books with more than a million websites hosted on their servers. They’re US-based but have customers in 150 countries and have six offices worldwide (although they’re not very clear on where these offices are located).

Originally founded by Thomas Gorny, iPage is now owned by the Endurance International Group: the same company that own FatCow, BlueHost and other well-known web hosting providers. They mention on their site that they purchase Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to offset their carbon emissions.

iPage Hosting Plans

The web hosting services offered by iPage are fairly straightforward. It’s not easy to find information though.

The cheapest plan is Website Hosting, and it seems as though the service is geared towards non-techies. For a flat monthly fee, iPage’s Website Hosting plan offers unlimited MySQL databases and domains, plus “loads” of disk space and bandwidth. The company don’t specify how much but state on their website that the vast majority of their customers fall within normal limits, and anyone who doesn’t is probably using their web hosting space for something they shouldn’t be doing (such as file sharing). The ToS states that “normal operation” of a website will be problem-free, but if you need guarantees on space, iPage may not be the best option.

In order to dig deep into the technical detail, you’ll need to click the ‘Features for Geeks’ links on the Hosting Features page. This still doesn’t reveal much. From the specifications, we’d guess they offer Linux hosting, but the actual word ‘Linux’ doesn’t appear anywhere on the page or even in their knowledge base.

Note that the prices they display are introductory rates; the renewal rates are higher.

The iPage website claims that the company also offers shared Windows Hosting on Windows 2003 servers. When I followed the link, I got a 404 page, so it’s probably safe to assume this has been discontinued. Likewise, their VPS hosting link took me to a 404 page, so again, it looks like they don’t offer VPS hosting any more.

I also found a reference to reseller hosting, but this link took me to another hosting company, JustHost. Reseller plans do offer Cpanel.

No plans appear to offer Zend Optimizer or Zen Cart.

iPage Uptime/Downtime

Websites created by iPage customers are hosted in two data centres in Boston, MA. Across the two facilities, they have 800 Dell servers. Each data centre offers round-the-clock security, N+1 AC and DC power and both have identical infrastructure. Customer data is mirrored across clustered servers to protect against downtime, and they also run UPS backup and have diesel generators too.

There are no details about uptime, and they don’t claim to have an uptime guarantee. Their servers are backed up daily using NetApp Snapshot.

iPage Support

Unlike most other hosting companies, iPage is very clear about the location of their support team. All staff are located in North America. They boast that calls are answered within approximately one minute, 24/7.

Although support is free, users can upgrade to Premium support for a hefty fee. This speeds up resolution time, but the expense is worth balancing against other hosts.

The support centre, although fairly sparse, is accessible by all customers and non-customers, with a range of knowledge base articles and tutorials. I found these to be on the basic side, although some of the video tutorials for applications such as their file manager, Joomla and WordPress (a CMS/ blog application) are enough to get you started if you’re a beginner. Web hosting clients can also use free live chat or submit tickets through an online system.

iPage in the News

It seems iPage have dodged controversy in the last decade, and I didn’t find any negative news reports about them. There’s anecdotal evidence of problems such as occasional hacks, but that’s to be expected with any web host. There doesn’t appear to be any headline stories to confirm this.

iPage Control Panel

The control panel on iPage is a custom-built application utilising a combination of scripts and tools to present information. Access to phpMyAdmin is available, but you’ll have to use iPage’s own control panel to get there.

The help information about the control panel in the knowledge base is basic at best (for example, a search for ‘control panel’ brings up a few articles about which browsers to use and how to find your way to the admin area - nothing more). There’s no working demo on the site, so it’s hard to say how much control users actually have over things like PHP resour