iPage Web Hosting Plans – Which to Choose for Your Website?

iPage was founded in 1998 and is a company of Endurance International Group. This Group has many other hosting-related brands as well, like BlueHost and HostGator. iPage hosts over 1 million websites and has 2 USA data centers. It is widely known as one of the cheapest web hosting providers of the industry.

Why Choose iPage

Apart from good prices, there are few key benefits to choosing iPage. The company puts the customer at the center, instead of being too technical. The employees are happy to solve the users’ problems; thus you will always find the customer representatives in good mood and they will be always super friendly.

iPage’s main audience consists of small businesses and independent customers, so they don’t focus on serving large companies. The hosting services were developed for being perfect for starters and for company websites too. The pricing model is also simple: to give one of the best prices on the market and band customers to the company in the long term.

iPage is considered as one of the most reliable companies in the web hosting industry. The fact is that the company’s already 19 years old career shows well why it is one of the most used hosting services on the Internet.

iPage provides a different kind of hosting, making a great mix of packages. You can use the most suitable one for your own purposes, just read our review to see the details.

The Essential Plan

The simplest hosting offer of iPage starts at $1.99/month and it is one of the cheapest offers of the industry. The key features of the package:

• unlimited storage
• scalable bandwidth
• unlimited number of domain names can be added
• no limit in the number of used databases

The company added extra features to the package, including the iPage Website Builder, a 1-click WordPress installer, free themes and plugins and more. vDeck is used as the control panel and there are also detailed traffic and analytics tools available.

You will also get a free SSL certification to make your website more secure and take advantages of being an HTTPS powered site. The easy-to-use setup wizards can guide you to add your favorite content management systems including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal; blog software like PixelPost and b2evolution; photo galleries like Gallery2 or ZenPhoto; or forum engines like Gbook, phpBB or Simple Machines Forums.

Selling online was never easier than now; iPage supports this kind of businesses with special online features. If you have such plans then you can launch your free online store easily, add PayPal to it or use a different kind of shopping carts and scripts, including AgoraCart, OpenCart, OSCommerce, PrestaShop, Zen Cart or TomatoCart.

The list of email related assets is also long; you can make an unlimited number of email addresses with your domain ending. The emails can be accessed via IMAP or POP3, and a webmail interface was also utilized to help you reaching your letters. Usual services, like setting forwarders or auto responders are also available and you can set special filters to catch the spam. A virus checker algorithm also works in the background, so you will be never a virus host.

The hardware behind the hosting is built up by using industry-leader providers, so your website’s work will be secured by Cisco routers and UPS uninterruptible power supplies and electricity generators. Both names mean quality and rule their own market piece.

The customer support is available 7/24 via a ticketing system, phone, and chat, and step-by-step tutorials are given to make the first steps in web hosting. iPage offers 30-day money-back guarantee for Essential Plan.

WordPress Hosting

iPage gives you WordPress Hosting as well; there are 2 kinds of hosting packages in this section:

1. WP Starter: This package is available from $3.75/month and includes unlimited web storage, unlimited bandwidth usage and a free domain name for a year. WordPress themes and plugins were also packaged into this offer.
2. WP Essential: The WP Essential package is available from the $6.95/month price. It is more advanced than the Starter one, since it offers the same unlimited assets and the free domain registration, plus provides additional features too. These include an expert support from WordPress professionals, SiteLock for guarding your site and an automatic service, which scans your files for malware and removes them.

The WordPress packages are specially designed for WordPress software and by utilizing few caching and other methods, your WP site may run 2.5 times faster than on classic hosting packages. The Pro WP customer specialists also have expert WordPress knowledge and they selected the best themes and plugins for the in-built library. The WordPress control panel also got some facelift in order to provide better management tools.

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) is another step that your website can reach, as soon as the traffic increases and shared hosting or WordPress hosting is not enough, you should purchase a VPS hosting package.

iPage offers 3 VPS packages:

1. Basic: The Basic package arrives with 1 CPU core, 1 GB of memory, 40 GB disk space, 1 IP address and 1 TB of bandwidth. It is available from the $19.99/month price.
2. Business: This package contains 2 CPU cores, 4 GB memory, 90 GB disk space, 3 TB bandwidth usage and 2 IP addresses. It starts at $47.99/month.
3. Optimum: The biggest VPS package gives you 4 CPU cores, 8 GB memory, 120 GB disk space and 4 TB bandwidth use, with 2 IP addresses. It is available from $79.99/month.

All VPS packages include free domain registration for a year and come with CentOS 6.4 operating system and cPanel management tool. You can have a root access as well, to add your own applications.

There are many scripts available pre-installed in packages, like PHP 5, Perl, Python and more. If you struggle with something, you can always ask the VPS support team of iPage, which is available 7/24.

Dedicated Servers

Once your website grows bigger and the virtual private server resources are not enough, it is time to switch to the dedicated server. In contrast with VPS, a dedicated server is a real physical entity and means your own server in the data center.

iPage offers dedicated servers as well, with its 3 packages:

1. Startup: This server contains 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB storage, 5 TB bandwidth usage and 3 IP addresses. It is available from $119.99/month.
2. Professional: The professional server already has 4 CPU cores, 8 GB memory, 1000 GB storage, 10 TB bandwidth and 4 IP addresses. Its starting price is $151.99/month.
3. Enterprise: The biggest package provides the same 4 CPU cores and 1000 GB storage, but with 16 GB memory, 15 TB of bandwidth usage and 5 IP addresses. It is available from $191.99/month.

All dedicated server packages contain free domain registration for a year and come with the same operating system, as VPS packages, CentOS 6.4. CPanel is also given for server management.

You can also benefit from preinstalled scripts; they are the same as in VPS packages, PHP 5, Perl, Python and more. Of course, there is also a 7/24 support team for these packages.

Domain Registration

Your website would not be alive only with hosting, domain registration is also needed. iPage offers domain names too; you can purchase your own one on the company’s website. The benefits that iPage offers you for domain registrations:

Over 300 TLDs

There are over 300 top-level domains to choose from, including classic ones like .com, .net or .org; country related domains like .us, .uk or .de, and newly created TLDs like .blog or .news. You can use the domain search function of the site where you can enter only your keyword or name and after pushing the search button, you will see the free top level domains.

A bulk search function is also available, so you can search for more than one phrase at once, thus saving your time and avoiding the unnecessary clicks for each name.

Domain privacy protection

If you don’t want to show your name, address and other details to other people, you can hide this kind of personal data. For a small $9.99/year fee you can purchase domain privacy protection, so your details won’t appear in public searches. The company will show the iPage details instead and your personal data will be only visible in your iPage account.

Long-term purchase and automatic renew

If you don’t want to handle the payment process and renewals every year, there is a chance to purchase your domain name for the long term. 2, 3, 4 and 5 yearlong terms are available and you can switch on the automatic renew feature too.

By using the latter one your domain names will never expire and you won’t have the risk to lose them. This service is free and automatically deducts the purchase price of the domain name from your payment method in the next billing period.

Which Plan is Right for You

We have just covered the whole web hosting offer of iPage, mentioned the shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS servers and dedicated servers. Also, we have shown you the benefits of domain registrations at the company.

But which plan is the best for you? A dedicated server would be the best for your website because it is robust and has many resources. However, this is the most expensive hosting category and it would be better to find the cheapest but most suitable hosting package for you.

Of course, all hosting types have pros and cons and you should know them to make your final decision.

Shared Hosting

Shared Hosting is ideal for new websites with low traffic. Because a physical server is split between hosting customers, you can start your site with a very low cost. There is also a downside to sharing, and to be honest, this is the most problematic thing with a common server.

You won’t be asked which customers you want to be neighbor on the same server, so sometimes problematic users will also be served with the same resources. If someone else runs a bad site with the wrong code, it may eat all of the common server resources, the memory, and the CPU power. This may result in a system halt with effect on other customers’ websites. If the server stops, your website will be also unavailable or will be displayed much slower.

Hosting companies have many server monitoring tools to avoid such a scenario, but in some cases, the bad neighbors might affect your website. Another big problem is the lack of real support; you should accept that if you pay few bucks monthly, you won’t get real support, making the customer representatives busy for hours.

WordPress Hosting

WordPress Hosting is basically shared hosting, dedicated to run WordPress. You can encounter the same pros and cons as we have covered in shared hosting section. However, if you want to use WordPress, then it is better to choose this kind of hosting, to take the advantages or the WP-friendly running environment.

Of course, WordPress hosting is more expensive than the shared one, but the small difference may be worth it to pay.

VPS Hosting

VPS is a much more reliable solution than a single shared hosting. It is a virtual server which means you still won’t get a whole server alone. But hosting companies usually place 10-20 customers on the same server and it is significantly better, then shared hosting’s hundreds of customers on the same server.

Another big plus of VPS storage, that you can avoid the bad neighborhood effect. Your website or websites will run in a separated environment and will never have an effect on other customers’ VPS parts. Also, they won’t have an effect on your own VPS part. If you make something wrong, your sites may be stopped, but other users won’t notice it and their sites will remain alive.

A big con of VPS is that it needs real server knowledge. In many cases, the hosting company gives you a single server piece and you should install a server operating system, which is usually a Linux version. You should know the Linux server commands and then install a web server, for example, Apache. If you want to communicate with your server – and you should of course – you can do it via SSH, which needs the knowledge of commands again. Alternatively, you can install a control panel, like cPanel, but it has a yearly license fee.

By choosing the iPage VPS packages, you will get managed VPS, which means that the company pros install you the server’s operating system, the web server application, and cPanel. Basically, you will get a working storage that can be easily maintained with the most common management tool, cPanel. You can also reach your server via SSL, but it is not a must.

Choose this hosting, if your website already has bigger traffic or you want to avoid the bad neighborhood effect of cheaper shared hosting.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Server is hosting often called as the king of hosting solutions. Once you rent a server, you will be the king of your own property; no one will bother your work. You will never experience the bad neighborhood effect, simply because you won’t have neighbors on your server.

Using this kind of hosting will need the same knowledge as VPS hosting needs. The server package also needs an operating system, web server app, and control panel for easier management, but luckily, iPage also offers them.

By using the iPage dedicated server hosting, you can focus on work instead of struggling with making an empty server into a working environment. Trust us, if someone is not a server administrator and hasn’t already spent many hours launching a new server, they will like the managed services very much. Server administration is a difficult thing for normal users; it is worth to leave that for geeks.

It is said that once your website reaches the monthly 500,000 visitors, you should think of using a dedicated server. Of course, it depends on you since the biggest VPS package of iPage is stronger in some resource parts than the smallest dedicated server package.

Conclusion

If you have arrived here then you already know which hosting types are available at iPage and you are ready to make the best choice. If you still need help, don’t hesitate to contact the iPage staff and get further information.

Once your new website is ready, you can focus on your main goal which is already supported by a reliable website!