iPage Hosting Review

We reviewed iPage’s services during the first part of 2010. Unlike some other sites (we won’t name names), we always review hosting services with complete anonymity in order to be able to view the experience from a user’s perspective as closely as possible. This is the approach we took with iPage, and good news: these guys are legit.

The signup process was quick and easy. We had to go through a couple of hoops in the registration process, but the entire process took us under 15 minutes to complete, and our account was set up and provisioned within mere minutes thereafter. Very fast!

We stepped in and deployed a few sites, using the domain we’d registered as well as a few addon domains. We deployed a Wordpress blog, a Drupal CMS site, a plain ol’ static HTML site and a site built using iPage’s built-in site builder tools. Everything was really smooth during the upload and setup process for our open-source-tool-powered sites, and iPage’s site builder tools were really easy to understand. No complaints here.

Next, we load-tested and uptime-tested the sites for 30 days. We saw a couple of tiny blips on the ping radar, but the total downtime for all sites combined during the 30-day window was under 10 seconds, which is most likely a statistical anomaly (and quite expected). Great uptime results. We also saw consistently fast page load times, so we have no complaints about the speed or the reliability of the service.

All in all, iPage was extremely satisfactory, but we decide to test their “unconditional” money-back guarantee to see if that was really the case. We were given a quick questionnaire about why we were cancelling, and then our money was refunded and the account was closed. Really simple and painless, though, in real life, we would have no reason to close the account since the service was so great! (We told one of their support guys this after we closed the account and he was glad to hear it.)

Speaking of support, we filed a few tickets during the test process. The first time, we intentionally “broke” our Wordpress site by flubbing the config file — even though it wasn’t technically a “server” issue, the tech support team still was able to fix the problem and have the site back up and running within mere minutes. Impressive. We also asked them to change DNS records, install a stats package and help us with mail setup, all of which they assisted us with. Great attitudes and very courteous and respectful — and they didn’t try to make us feel dumb for asking questions that were stupid (at least to them, maybe).

All in all, iPage comes highly recommended. Check them out now!