iPower Reviews – Web Hosting Services

iPower is a web hosting company founded in 2001 by current CEO Thomas Gorny. With services aimed at both individuals and businesses, iPower hosting offers low-cost plans and packages, trying to attract a large range of customers from all mediums. iPower reviews available online generally praise the company’s affordable services, while also identifying some shortcomings, especially in the support department.

They offer their own control panel that is easy to use and gives you just what their shared users need. VPS and dedicated servers have the option of cPanel to give more control. This iPower review will provide detailed information about what their web hosting services offer. At the end, we will also provide detailed recommendations, should you find that iPower is not a great fit for your website.

Official iPower Landing page

iPower Overview

Most of iPower’s plans offer unlimited resources. In online reviews, they come up ahead in uptime. 99.99% uptime is their monthly average, which is incredible for a web hosting company to provide. Their page load speeds average around 1.7 seconds. While this isn’t horrible, it is not the best. Five seconds will cause most visitors to bounce and leave your site. anything around 2 seconds is pushing it.
iPower offers FTP, CGI-BIN, PERL, and PHP support but not all of their perks are development related. They also offer marketing guides for those just starting out and your site can be eCommerce ready with 3 different shopping carts to choose from and PayPal integration. They also provide 1GB of cloud storage from JustCloud.

Pricing Information

iPower has several types of hosting, from shared hosting to dedicated servers. They provide what they call ‘scalable’ bandwidth in many of their plans. This is the same thing as ‘unlimited’ or ‘unmetered’ offered by other plans. It means over 99% of their customers will not need more bandwidth than they can offer. If they do, then they will be able to offer a different solution for you.

There is no option for money back guarantee with iPower which means that if you decide to cancel their services, you will have to pay a cancellation fee of minimum $35 and also give a one month’s notice.

Package Name Dedicated to Price Disk Space Bandwidth Websites Hosting Type
Starter Small Site/Blog $3.99/mo 5GB 250GB 1 vDeck
Pro Medium Site/Blog $3.95/mo Unlimited Scalable Unlimited vDeck
Pro Plus Large Site/Blog $11.99/mo Unlimited Scalable Unlimited vDeck
WP Starter WordPress Blogs $3.75/mo Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited Customized
WP Essential WordPress Blogs $6.95/mo Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited Customized
Windows Pro Any Website/Blog/ASP.net/AJAX $6.95/mo Unlimited Scalable 25 vDeck
VPS Growing Sites needing Flexibility $19.99-$79.99/mo 40GB-120GB 1TB-4TB Unlimited cPanel
Dedicated Servers Quickly Growing Business Sites $119.99-$191.99/mo 500GB-1000GB 5TB-15TB Unlimited cPanel

Security & Risk

Security is very important, especially if you are collecting personal information or taking payments on your website. If you’re looking for SSL certificates, you’ll have to pay at least $29.99/year for the privilege through iPower. they do have 2 data center locations which have backup generators and are staffed and guarded 24 hours a day. They also have 24/7 network monitoring and daily server-side backups at no extra charge.

Usability & User Friendliness

iPower is one of the few web hosting companies that allow their customers to pick from different types of website builders. They have a blog and photo gallery wizard that works with the website builders as well. SSI (server side includes) are available and they also include a graphical website statistic program within their custom control panel. Dedicated server customers can have the option for root access as well.

Customer Support & Additional Info

iPower has tons of information in their user guides and knowledge base. However, if you still need help, their expert support team is available 24/7 via chat, phone, or by a ticket system. Their money back guarantee lasts for a full 30 days, which is the industry standard. Unfortunately, their customer support reviews are some of the worst overall. Long wait times have been reported with even longer waits for resolutions.

Below, you can find the links to their contact pages and sections.

iPower Overall Rating:

What we like:

  • Excellent Uptime – With a 99.99% uptime, you can’t go wrong.
  • Unlimited/Scalable Resources – While many web hosts offer this, it is good to know that iPower hosting is willing to help you with scaling should you grow beyond your current plan.
  • Low-cost services – iPower is marketed towards small businesses and individual users which means they maintain competitive prices for their services.

What we don’t like: 

  • Horrible Support Reviews – Long wait times and even longer waits for resolutions make customers very unhappy.
  • Unprofessional Tech Support Team –  There are issues with downtime and security, as well as with the company’s policy for shutting down websites without notice.

Rating:
Web Hosting Plans & Prices: 5/5
Security and Risk: 4/5
Usability & User Friendliness: 5/5
Customer Support: 2/5

iPower Top Alternatives

Are you still looking for a web hosting service after reading this iPower review? If iPower isn’t for you, check out these amazing competitors.

  • Bluehost – Bluehost’s uptime average is slightly lower, but page loads are faster. They also offer reseller hosting for anyone interested in offering their own hosting services.
  • ServerMania – ServerMania offers a 100% uptime guarantee and their speed is slightly faster than iPower. While they do not offer any really cheap plans, their hosting services have quite a lot of disk space and bandwidth. Security is also a priority for Servermania, with protection against 25 classes of DDoS and 7 layers of protection from server-side to your individual account.
  • TMDHosting – If you want a very fast web hosting service, then look no further than TMDHosting. They use 7 layers of cache to make their already fast SSD hosting even faster. They also give their customers a domain for life.
  • SiteGround – SiteGround’s customer service has excellent customer reviews online. They have no hold times on chat or hone, and there is a 10 minute average wait time for ticker replies via their help desk.

Our Verdict

For usability and price, iPower is top notch. However, we have major concerns about iPower’s customer support reputation. It used to be great, but many long-term customers are now finding them unbearable.  As the iPower reviews show, this company’s services are low-cost, but inconsistent and at times, even bothersome and low-quality.
Do you have experience with iPower? Do you have questions? Please comment below. We would enjoy hearing what you have to share about this iPower review!


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