Is iPage a Good Choice for UK Customers?

I’m pretty sure there are many users out there from the UK who are looking to get a cheap hosting account to start a website. I’m confident you have already come across iPage rather on a web hosting reviews sites or through advertisement.

If you don’t know what iPage is, you should probably check out our complete iPage review. Ipage is a popular web hosting provider, offering low cost shared hosting service. Although iPage.com is a US based company, they have customers from all over the world.

Ipage is a great and inexpensive hosting solution for a small business website or a low traffic blog. If you are a beginner in website building, iPage will be a great choice for you. With iPage’s drag-and-drop site builder, anyone can create a website, without the need of learning HTML, CSS or any other programming language. They also offer one-click installation software, that will help users to install the choose scripts to their domain with the press of a button.

This was a quick introduction to iPage, but let’s get back to business and figure out if this company is the right solution if you are from the UK.

When you choose a web hosting provider, first you should have a type of website in mind. First you make a plan, decide on what kind of website you want to create and then you choose a hosting provider. As wrote above, if you are planning to create a small business site that will target a world-wide audience, iPage will be a very good option.

Ok, but what if you have a local business and most of the website traffic will come locally, from the UK. Well in this case you should take in consideration the fact, that iPage does not offer the option to choose a server location. The company offers service for UK customers; the price of the hosting package is displayed in British pound if you are accessing their site from the United Kingdom, however their servers are located in the US.

But wait, let’s test if the location of their servers will impact your business in any way.

Does Server Location Matters?

If you are targeting customers locally and your website is hosted oversees, the loading time of your website might be slower, compared to your competition’s whose website is hosted nearby. Even though the difference might be minimal, like 2 or 3 seconds, from the view of a potential customer, might be decisive factor.

The fact is that users hate slow websites. I have found many customer reviews over the web, complaining about iPage and its speed and really wanted to see it myself. So I have decided to actually test their service by performing speed tests of a website hosted on one of iPage’s server. We have run these tests multiple times and at different hours, making sure that we have data from the period when the website traffic and server load is higher. With the help of Pingdom and Webpagetest.org we used different server locations to test the website. The average load time results are as follows:

Tested From Average Load Time
Amsterdam, Netherlands 1.42 s
Dallas, Texas, USA 1.02 s
Melbourne, Australia 5.42 s
Sydney, Australia 4.95 s
New York City, NY, USA 304 ms
San Jose, California, USA 1.20 s
Stockholm, Sweden 1.96 s
London, United Kingdom 2.56 s
Dublin, Ireland 3.12 s
Manchester, United Kingdom 3.49s

These test shows that iPage’s servers have a very good connection in the US and an average connection from EU. The results also shows that users from Australia will have to wait around 5 seconds for the website to fully load.

How Fast Should Your Website Load?

There is actually no rule for how fast a website should load, but you should keep in mind that the faster your website loads the better. Website loading speed can be influenced by many factors, such as technology used for developing it, how many users are on the website at the same time, how many images, content are on the same page, etc. The thing is that users, potential customers, will choose the website that loads faster. Just as an example, let’s say your website takes 8 seconds to load. Now count from 1 to 8. In this time the user could already be calling you and asking for an offer. Instead they choose to click the “back” button and look somewhere else.

Website speed is also considered a ranking factor in Google. In the following video, Matt Cutts (software engineer at Google) explains that:

Although there is no set time for how fast a website should load, the average loading time of big and popular websites are 1-3 seconds. Your website’s loading speed should be close to this to provide the best experience for your users, who are used to browse their favorite sites at that speed.

Should You Consider iPage for a UK Website?

As the above results show, a website hosted at iPage will have a slower connection in the UK, but the average loading time is around 3 seconds, which in my opinion is a good result. If you are looking for a cheap web hosting for your small business website or personal blog, iPage will be a good option, even though most of your visitors are from the UK.

If you choose to sign up with iPage, you will be able to register a .co.uk, .org.uk or other domain of your choice. Beside this, you will be able to install WordPress or other content management system you like with the press of a button, or you can use their Site Builder tool to create your professional looking website.

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David Cross

David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.