iPage Review 2024: Pros, Cons, And Alternatives

There are countless hosting providers offering affordable web hosting, and they all claim to be the best. As experienced web hosting evaluators, we have explored a multitude of options and are here to provide insight into how iPage measures up against its competition.

Like most entry-level web hosting companies, iPage web hosting comes with some trade-offs. It’s affordable on just about any budget but doesn’t quite hit the speed and performance benchmarks of pricier hosts in the web hosting industry.

Does iPage’s affordability make up for its performance?

In this iPage review, you’ll learn everything you need to know about iPage web hosting services, including price, performance, features, support, useability, and more.

iPage Hosting Plans Review

There are three types of hosting in the iPage offer: shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated hosting services.

With shared hosting, your website shares a server with thousands of other websites. If another website on your shared server has a big spike in traffic, your website might slow down as a result.

Dedicated hosting gives your website its own server, which means you don’t have to share resources with any other website. You never have to worry about another website slowing you down when you’re on a dedicated server.

VPS is sort of the middle-ground between shared and dedicated hosting. You share a server with other websites, but you have exclusive use of a certain portion of that server’s resources.

1. Shared Hosting

If you’re launching your first blog or affiliate site, you’ll likely start with a shared web host. iPage’s hosting services are one of the cheapest shared hosting plans available today. The iPage web hosting plan currently runs at the promotional rate of $1.99/month.

What features does iPage offer?

2. VPS Hosting

VPS is the next step up from shared web hosting. If your website has outgrown the resources you can get from a shared server, VPS can give you the speed and performance you need. It’s the perfect middle ground between shared and dedicated.

Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll get with VPS hosting:

For VPS hosting, iPage ranks somewhere in the middle compared to other hosting providers. Its basic plan is cheaper than Bluehost’s with comparable stats.

On the other hand, GoDaddy offers a 2 CPU core, 2 GB of RAM, and 100 GB of disk space for the same price as iPage’s Basic VPS package (before renewal).

3. Dedicated Hosting

If you’ve got an established—and profitable—site with lots of traffic, you might be interested in dedicated hosting. Dedicated servers are the most expensive option, but the dedicated server will give you the best possible speed and performance.

Here’s a look at iPage’s dedicated plans:

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Pricing

iPage displays promotional rates for all of its web hosting plans. As with other web hosting plans, you really need to read the fine print here.

Once your initial hosting term runs out, you’ll have to renew your hosting plan—often at a higher rate than the one you signed up for. Renewal rates are sometimes more than double or triple promo rates. If you have auto-renewal set up, you could be in for an expensive surprise.

For example, let’s look at their shared plan. The $1.99/month promo price only applies if you purchase 36 months of hosting upfront. If you want a shorter term, like 12 months or 24 months, you will pay a bit more per month.

VPS and dedicated hosting plans follow a similar scheme of promotional pricing plus a higher renewal rate:

iPage shared pricing:

iPage VPS pricing:

iPage dedicated pricing:

iPage also has a 30-day money-back guarantee which means there’s little risk in taking their shared web hosting plan for a test drive.

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iPage Performance: Speed And Uptime

One of iPage’s biggest weaknesses is performance. A fast-loading and reliable website is critical if you want to make money online.

When it comes to performance, we’re looking at two key metrics: speed and uptime. How does iPage handle the speed test? We’ll be blunt—not very well.

We ran speed tests through GT Metrix to see how well iPage performs from three different locations around the world. Here are the results:

Pretty poor performance across the board. iPage’s servers are all located in Boston, which means slow speeds for users outside of the US.

So speed’s a bust, but what about reliability? Let’s look at iPage’s uptime.

iPage guarantees 99.9% uptime on their website. According to Pingdom[1]—which has uptime data going back to 2015—iPage doesn’t make good on that promise.

In 2021, iPage had a 99.82% uptime, with over 400 outages and 15 hours of total downtime.

Reliability is huge, and for site owners building an audience or selling online, that level of downtime is pretty unacceptable, even for the most affordable web hosts.

If you rely on your website for affiliate commissions, product sales, or even display ad revenue, those 15 hours of downtime could cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Check out this roundup of the fastest hosting providers if you’re looking for speed.

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iPage Features

1. Free Domain Registration

iPage offers free domain registration with all of its plans. However, you’ll have to pay the standard renewal rate to keep your free domain name registration after one year.

Rates vary depending on your domain extension. For a standard .com domain, that’s $19.99 per year—a pretty average price for domain hosting.

You can transfer domain names to your account right from the dashboard. You’ll need an authorization code from your current domain registrar. Once you go through all the steps in the dashboard, your transfer should complete in 7 days or less.

2. Unlimited Storage

iPage states on their hosting page that they offer unlimited disk space for customers as long as they’re compliant with iPage’s terms and conditions.

When it comes to shared web hosting, “unlimited” disk space almost always has some caveats. If a website gets too big, it will eat up way too many server resources for a shared system to handle. When that happens, every website on the shared server can take a performance hit.

iPage hosting has a disclaimer on instances where they’ve had to work with customers to reduce the number of files on their servers. As per their terms of service, they have a “soft cap” of 20,000 files on the disk space.

3. Scalable Bandwidth

The bandwidth you get from your web host is what determines how fast your site will ultimately be.

Most shared hosting platforms claim to offer unlimited bandwidth, and iPage makes a similar claim with “scalable bandwidth.”

The truth is, no shared server can actually give you unlimited bandwidth. But since most websites will never need more bandwidth than a shared server can provide, hosting companies say “unlimited” instead of getting into specific numbers.

4. Unlimited MySQL Databases

MySQL databases are how your website stores and organizes data. Within a MySQL database, different types of data are organized into various tables. It’s not the same as file storage, but it’s a central aspect of web hosting.

As with storage space, iPage puts a soft cap on MySQL databases: 1,000 database tables and 3 GB in total database size (or 2 GB for a single database).

If you go past those limits, iPage will request that you pare down your databases or move to a VPS or dedicated plan.

Should you worry about those limits?

The short answer is not really. The average MySQL database for a WordPress site is around 85 MB[2]. If you’re starting a brand-new website, it would take years of posting content every day to get your database even close to those levels.

5. Free SSL Certificate

Even if you plan on running a simple info blog, you want to keep your site secure. An SSL certificate tells browsers like Chrome and your users that they can trust your website. Google even uses it as a ranking signal[3]. In other words, you need this certificate.

Every iPage web hosting plan comes with a free certificate that you can activate from the dashboard with a single click. Free SSL is a standard basic feature for many shared web hosting providers, so they don’t really have an advantage here.

iPage might try to upsell you on a premium SSL certificate for an additional $3/month—don’t take the bait.

6. WordPress Hosting

iPage offers a free WordPress install with their shared hosting plan. Setup is a super easy process—just a few clicks from the dashboard, and you’ll have WordPress up and running in less than five minutes.

iPage also offers managed WordPress hosting plans. The iPage WordPress hosting plan could be useful if you just want to get a WordPress site up and running.

It’s a little more expensive than their standard Go Plan: $3.75/month for the WP Starter plan and $6.95/month for the WP Essential plan.

Like their other hosting plans, you’ll pay higher renewal rates once your term is up.

7. Website Builder

If you’re not looking to run a WordPress website, iPage features a free site builder that can hold your hand through the web design process.

The iPage Website Builder works by taking you through a series of questions to generate a custom web template.

You can run with the template they generate for you or browse through various pre-made templates organized by website type (blog, online store, etc.) and niche (fashion, photography, sports, etc.).

Website Builder has a free tier and two premium tiers:

Their Website Builder is passable, but it’s missing the drag-and-drop functionality and other quality-of-life features that other web hosts and content management systems provide.

8. cPanel

Almost every web hosting provider uses cPanel for backend site management. cPanel has a lot of functionality, but you might find it a little overwhelming if this is your first time running a website.

iPage uses its control panel, and it is much more beginner-friendly than cPanel.

On the dashboard, you’ll see a summary with domain info and options. The left-hand sidebar lets you navigate to Website Builder, WordPress, email management, security, DNS & nameservers, and transfers.

One thing to be aware of is that iPage really tries to upsell you in their dashboard. For example, the SSL option in the left-hand sidebar takes you to their paid certificate.

But on the main page, there’s an option called LetsEncrypt Free SSL. Simply toggle that option on, and you have the free SSL iPage advertised.

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Support

If you plan on running your website for several years, you’re inevitably going to run into some roadblocks. A strong tech support system can help you troubleshoot issues you’re having with your site.

iPage boasts 24/7 support, but availability doesn’t mean quality. Granted, iPage has an incredibly fast support response time. When you reach out to their customer support team, you’ll likely get a response in less than five seconds.

The support team doesn’t always have the technical knowledge to answer your questions. When that happens, they’ll create a support ticket, and you’re stuck waiting for someone to get back to you.

Here are a few Trustpilot reviews lamenting iPage’s poor customer support:

Some problems can wait, but if your whole site is broken, waiting for hours or days for help can be excruciating.

On top of that, users have reported iPage support trying to upsell them on premium features instead of working to resolve their issues.

In the end, iPage’s near-instant response time doesn’t make up for their poor support.

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Pros And Cons

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iPage vs Bluehost

So far this iPage review has only considered iPage in isolation. But how does it stack up to other popular web hosting plans?

For comparison, let’s take a look at how iPage compares to Bluehost when it comes to performance, pricing, ease-of-use, features and support.

Performance Test

Fast and reliable performance is one of the top factors to consider when choosing a web host. When it comes to shared web hosting, the cheapest options usually mean slower performance.

We ran iPage and Bluehost through GT Metrix to see how their speed stacks up side-by-side:

Both providers suffer from only having data centers in the United States, but iPage tops Bluehost in performance scores and fully load times.

Winner: iPage

Pricing Comparison

We’ve already mentioned how affordable iPage’s shared hosting plan is. Compared to Bluehost’s cheapest plan, you can save heaps of money with iPage.

iPage offers a three-year hosting plan for $1.99/month, which equals an upfront cost of $71.64.

Bluehost’s basic plan is on sale for $3.45/month for the first year, after which the standard renewal rate kicks in. For comparison, let’s go with the $9.49/month renewal rate for a two-year plan.

The total cost for 3 years of Bluehost would be $269.16—nearly four times the price of iPage.

Winner: iPage

Ease-Of-Use

Bluehost uses cPanel while iPage uses its own control panel dashboard.

cPanel has a lot of options and can have a bit of a learning curve. But once you get the hang of it, cPanel is actually pretty intuitive and easy to use.

iPage’s dashboard takes a minimalist approach and is easy to pick up right out of the gate. More advanced or lesser-used functions are hidden in submenus, which helps avoid the overwhelm new users might feel with cPanel.

Winner: Tie (with iPage getting a slight edge for absolute beginners)

Other Features

Both companies offer a free domain name for one year, a 30-day money-back guarantee and one-click WordPress installs. Both offer similar premium add-on features like domain privacy and Sitelock Security.

Bluehost has the edge over iPage with its Website Builder, which has a drag and drops functionality and better customization. Feel free to check in-depth iPage and Bluehost comparison in our article.

Winner: Bluehost (due to its better website builder)

Support Comparison

We mentioned iPage’s abysmal support earlier, but how does it look next to Bluehost?

Support isn’t a strong selling point for iPage or Bluehost. iPage has the response time, but their support team isn’t always helpful and loves pushing the upsells. Bluehost offers better overall support but has issues with response time.

How do they fare on Trustpilot?

iPage has a 1.7 rating, while Bluehost has a 3.0 rating. Neither of those scores are good, but Bluehost is the clear winner here.

Winner: Bluehost

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FAQs

Where are iPage’s servers located?

iPage’s servers are located in Boston, MA in two data centers. If you’re using iPage, visitors from outside the US might experience slow load times when using your website. Consider using a free CDN like Cloudflare.

How Do I Add A Second Website To My iPage Account?

Add a second website to your iPage hosting account by logging into your account, going to the domain dashboard, and selecting “Purchase Domain.” After purchase, your new domain will be listed on your domain dashboard, where you can set up WordPress or use the Website Builder.

How Do I Contact iPage?

You can contact iPage in two ways. You can their online support chat from the menu at the bottom of the home page or the contact page. You can also call iPage at 1 (877) 472-4399.

Is iPage Better Than Hostgator?

With iPage, you get great customer support and a free domain name. Their budget-friendly pricing includes a wide range of tools, while HostGator can sometimes be pricier for similar offerings. You can check our iPage and Hostgator comparison for more in-depth analysis.

How Do I Delete My iPage Account?

You can delete your iPage account by going into the dashboard, clicking on the hosting tools icon, and selecting hosting renewal. From there, you can cancel your automatic renewal payment or cancel your account immediately. 

Does iPage Use cPanel?

No, iPage does not use cPanel. Instead, they use their own custom dashboard for back-end website management.

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Is It Worth Using iPage in 2024?

For a hosting service, iPage is not the best option. Granted, it’s cheap—$1.99/month for three years might be the lowest price around for a shared hosting service. But the affordability of this hosting service comes at a cost.

Speed and reliability are two things you don’t want to compromise on for web hosting. iPage’s hosting service, uptime, and load speeds are not up to par. Site owners looking to grow an audience or build an online business should probably steer clear of iPage.

Other hosts like Siteground can give you much better performance at a decent price.

We can only recommend iPage hosting service if you’re just trying to get your feet wet in running a website and want to get started on the lowest possible budget.