Menu
Our independent research projects and impartial reviews are funded in part by affiliate commissions, at no extra cost to our readers.
Our independent research projects and impartial reviews are funded in part by affiliate commissions, at no extra cost to our readers.
You have a great website idea, and you’re ready to make your page. The only question is who should host your site. There are many website hosting options, and finding the right one is crucial to having a great website.
In this iPower hosting review, you will learn if iPower can help you with your specific website idea. You’ll see if it offers the best features to help you with your website goals.
What do you need in a web host? You want a service that is affordable, easy to use, reliable and offers the features that your site needs. Can iPower fulfill all of these for you, or do you have to look for other options?
iPower Hosting is a highly customizable website hosting service. The company offers users a lot of options to help tailor their website experience to their needs. To do this, they offer seven different hosting plans that provide unique features.
Once you pick a plan, you can also add specific services that can help you achieve your goals with your site. These include help with marketing, eCommerce, and website management.
With iPower, you can pick between super affordable shared hosting that lets you start your site at a very low price point, or you can get a dedicated hosting site if performance is your top concern, and you can pay the higher price.
All of these choices allow you to build the web hosting experience that will fill your needs the best while still finding a price point that can work for you. iPower lets you control every aspect of your site.
iPower started hosting websites in 2001. During their 20 years of existence, they have become known as a leader in small and medium business web service needs.
They believe in listening to their customers and go to great lengths to learn about your experience and what you want to do. They send out surveys and host focus groups so they can serve you better.
iPower has over 2,400 sq ft of data center space in Boston, MA. There are two locations to hold multiple Petabytes of server storage. They are fully secure and designed to keep your data and websites safe.
If, after learning about iPower, you’re not sure if you would want to host your website with them, there are many alternatives out there that can help you out. Here are a few of the most popular options to use if iPower isn’t for you.
Matt Heaton, the founder of Bluehost, has been in the web hosting business since 1996, but Bluehost wasn’t created until 2003. It is one of the most popular hosting sites out there. Users can build their site with WordPress for Bluehost, which is extremely easy to use.
The control panel is cPanel, the system used by many of the biggest companies out there. When you learn this system, you can use it with many other sites if you ever decide to switch host providers.
Bluehost offers many of the same features as iPower, but they have better user reviews, especially for their customer service. The easier-to-use customer service can be beneficial for anyone who is not comfortable with tech.
HostGator started as a student project in Florida in 2003. It has grown to become one of the leaders in web hosting. HostGator is a little less expensive than iPower, but it offers fewer features and options than you can choose with iPower.
Where HostGator differs the most from iPower is that you can get a Reseller hosting with the company. You can sell the hard drive space that you aren’t using with Hostgator to other websites. This option can help you pay for your site and earn extra income for your company.
You can get a lot of different features with your iPower hosting. Some of these come built into different plans, and some features you have to pay a premium to use.
When you are picking a web hosting company, these options will allow you to create your site the way you need to help your users.
Shared hosting allows multiple sites to use one server. Dedicated hosting uses one server for only your website. Depending on your site, there are advantages and disadvantages to each style.
Dedicated hosting is more expensive. However, you can control every aspect of your server this way. You get to use all resources on your server. Your site will be much faster, and it will perform better without worrying about what other websites are doing.
Shared hosting is much cheaper. It allows you to start your site with a minimal upfront cost. You do have to share the server with others, which can cause slowdowns.
The biggest drawback with the shared server is the bad neighbor effect. If someone else on your server is spamming emails, your emails can get blocked by some providers.
You can pick which hosting option works best for your needs. If you need to upgrade, you can do that through iPower without having to change companies.
You can pick from four different web builders to make your site. These builders allow you to find the maker that works the best for you. Each of the builders has helpful features, so it is a matter of preference for which one you want to use.
There are plenty of templates that let you make your website fast. You can customize your site using drag and drop tech, so you don’t need to know how to code. The site builders let everyone create the page they want.
Starting with the Pro Plan, you gain access to a few different shopping cart options and a PayPal pay feature. With these shopping carts, you can create a web page to sell goods and items.
The company also offers extended eCommerce features if you need even more payment options for your website. It can also help you with more shopping carts and inventory management.
Whether you’re selling an occasional piece of merch or creating a whole store, iPower can help you. They have everything you need to get your eCommerce site up and running.
With every hosting plan, you get $100 toward marketing with Microsoft and Google. For Google, you have to spend $25 to get the bonus. For Microsoft, you just have to create an account. It can help your website get more exposure. It will help you build your site and attract the first users.
iPower offers users the ability to backup and restore your site if you ever lose or delete your data. You can choose to backup your site when you are making significant changes or restore your site from a system-created backup.
If you need to restore your site, you can do it with just a click of a button. The backup helps you protect your hard work if there is ever a problem.
You can add extra security to your site. It can make your site safer, and it helps customers trust the page, especially when making purchases. You can get and use an SSL certificate that could help with security and increase your chance of being seen on search engines.
You can use iPower’s affiliate program to help you pay off your website hosting and make a little extra money for yourself. For every person that signs up for qualified hosting plans, you can make $65.00. Signing up one person can help you pay for your hosting cost for the whole year.
With website management, you can gain access to extra website support, different plug-in options, or even complete site setup with iPower professionals. Some of these features come free with specific hosting plans, but some you have to pay extra to use.
You can also gain access to more web building tools and templates to help make your site better. You can make a heavy database page with MySQL database.
There are seven different web hosting plan options that iPower offers for hosting. These include plans for shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Plans start as low as $3.95. Each plan provides you features that can help you make your website work for you.
Some plans offer monthly rates, but you have to purchase for at least a year for most plans. You do get savings for many of the longer plans, so it may be financially beneficial to sign up for multiple years.
As your site and business grow, you can upgrade and change your plan, and you can choose to add new features. iPower can help you make changes if you think you may need more services.
Pro Plus gives you everything you get with the Pro Plan, but you gain a few more helpful features. It is a shared host option that gives you up to 50 products on your shop’s site. You also gain unlimited emails and the most choices for website building templates.
With this plan, you get three free domain names, and you can add unlimited domain names to your plan. You can choose between one and two-year plans at this level.
Choose from the following options:
No matter which plans you choose, you can add helpful services that allow you to customize your site to serve your needs better. You can add these to any plan to make your iPower hosting work for you.
You can purchase your domain names with iPower. You can pick from over 300 different extensions, and you can put requests in for upcoming domain extensions.
Domain Services allow you to buy, redirect, protect, and transfer your domains with ease. You can also use services that help make your domain perform better and load faster. You can add these services to any domain you register.
Staying in contact with customers, clients, and other people is essential to running a productive website.
You can add extra email solutions to your hosting plan so that you can communicate with more people. These plans can help you with communication solutions for your website. You can pick between Google and Microsoft email plans.
You can also add premium features like an advanced spam filter to keep your email clean and increased mailbox storage that lets you save more emails. You can get up to 10 GB of storage space.
With e-Commerce services, you can make your site easier to use to sell products. It can help users feel safer shopping on your site. These services can help you increase the products you can post and help you make extra sales.
You can add more payment options for your website, and you can add security like Sitelock that promises your customers that your site is safe to use.
Sometimes the most challenging part of starting a new site is the marketing. With iPower’s marketing services, you can choose to gain more tools for your marketing campaign, or you can have marketing experts build and implement your entire campaign.
You can add email marketing services, SEO services, and search engine marketing services to ensure that you reach the most potential customers and grow your business.
When you are purchasing services from iPower, you can use three methods to pay. They can take credit cards, PayPal, or check and money orders. If you are using non-US currency, you have to use a Visa or Mastercard. The company doesn’t allow payment in the form of cryptocurrency.
If you are not happy with iPower hosting, you can cancel it in the first 30 days and receive a full refund for their services.
The only caveat to this is if you registered a domain name with iPower. In that case, there is a 15 dollar non-refundable fee. However, you get to keep your domain name to use it with your next hosting company.
Here are some quick answers to common questions about iPower’s web hosting.
iPower lets you choose from a few different website builders. Their primary builder is called WebsiteBuilder. You can also decide to use WordPress, Weebly, and CM4all. Having these choices allows you to make your site with the website builder you feel most comfortable using.
Yes, iPower allows you to register a lot of different domains. Currently, you can choose from 371 available domain extensions that start at $1.99 for a .live domain. The price is based on the domain extension. For a .com it costs $9.99.
The most basic function of a web hosting provider is to allow you to store the files for your website on their server. The server enables others to access this information so that they can see your site.
The web hosting industry can offer a lot more services beyond that, like a site builder, domain name registration, security, and other benefits.
A domain is what you use to get to a website. You have to register your website name to ensure there are no other websites with the same name. A host stores the website data on the server and allows other people to view the site.
Often you can get both services from one provider, but not always. iPower allows you to register domain names and host the site. With some iPower plans, you get free domain names.
iPower uses the vDeck control panel. The panel is unique to iPower, and different from the more often used cPanel that other companies use. If this is your first site, the control panel will be easy to learn and intuitive.
If you are transferring over your site, you will have a learning curve with vDeck. You likely would be used to cPanel, which is different enough to cause some confusion with vDeck.
iPower is constantly exceeding expectations with their top-of-the-line customer service. The company has a unique “customer experience” team that continuously monitors monthly surveys and focus groups to find ways to improve. Based on customer feedback, the company is always evolving towards a client-focused approach.
iPower has options to contact support 24/7. You can reach them every day of the year; they don’t take off holidays. You can call, chat, or email support whenever you have a question.
Many customers have complained about long wait times for customer services. There are also many complaints about problems being closed without resolution. There may be concerns about the quality of the service, but it is always available.
iPower offers easy-to-direct and process user guides for every aspect of their platform. If you’d like to take a more do-it-yourself approach to answer your own questions, you can find an array of materials that will help you through the process.
The user guide is broken down into sections such as advanced hosting, files, policies, and video tutorials to help you better understand how to navigate their services.
In this iPower hosting review, you have seen how much you can customize your web hosting experience. However, you don’t get as many features built into your plans as other hosting services offer because of the amount of customization.
The starting price for the product is reasonable, but some of the plans increase the price for renewing the service.
The company has no uptime guarantees, but they do claim a 99.9% uptime, which is very good.
Users mention the company’s customer support in many negative reviews, and that hurts their overall standings. When you have a website issue, you want immediate help, and you must get the problem fixed in a way that you feel confident the issues won’t return.
iPower is an ok option to build your site, but many other options have better customer service and similar price points. In our opinion, you may be better using one of these alternatives.
