Search “web hosting company” in Google and you will find detailed comparison tables. Together with coded terms: Cron, CGI, SSI...
This iPage review breaks it all down in simple...terms, with details if you want to probe. Overall, we think the hosting company is affordable & quick to begin with.
(They already host over a million websites...)
On with the review:
Entrepreneurial Legacy 💻
Founded in 1998 as a full web service company, iPage rebranded in 2008 as a hosting provider.
They’re currently owned by EIG...
EIG owns a few choice UK hosting companies. But they’ve iPage at their roots, with plans customized for small companies just starting out.
(... Small business/individual, with little to no experience in web development? You’re the bread and butter customer they go for.)
Our Verdict
Great for Small Biz & Individuals 🙋
iPage comes with a great website builder and offers a pricing plan that is manageable for just about anyone. Combine that with decent server speeds and uptimes and you got yourself a great web host for smaller businesses and individuals.
Still, there are some things about iPage that we disliked. For example, the lack of free backups, missing cPanel, and it being owned by EIG.
PROS
CONS
iPage UK 🇬🇧 Review
Quality Budget Hosting Option 💳
iPage is a budget-oriented hosting company, yet they manage to jamb pack features in.
With all plans, you’ll have a diverse array of tools to make your website, or websites with - as you start off with unlimited domains.
Note: With iPage, free hosting does not yet exist. Pay a little and you get lots, though.
Website Builder 
Their free website builder allows you to choose from hundreds of templates.
Create your website within a minuscule amount of time. The builder is limited to 6 pages, though that is more than most people and businesses will need.
The pages it produces are quick-to-load and rank high on Google.
Unlimited Plans
If you’re a web designer and want to host your clients’ websites to reduce their hassle, iPage is great for you.
All of iPage’s plans come with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domains - so you can host as many websites as you want to.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Grab a refund within 30 days of purchasing - no questions asked.
This applies to all hosting plans and ensures that you don’t lose any money - even if you decide to go with another hosting provider.
vDeck instead of cPanel
vDeck is not the industry-standard hosting panel. This is mainly because it’s under-featured and a little harder to use - especially for newbies.
For most users, cPanel would be easier to work with - and they actually prefer it.
Even though cPanel offers a few more features, vDeck is a good alternative but takes some getting used to.
No Free Backups
Backups are the only sure-fire way to protect your website from downtime.
One coding error could result in you scrolling through code for days. This can easily be prevented by just restoring a backup...
Unfortunately, that doesn’t come for free with iPage... Having this peace of mind will cost you additional money.
iPage Uptime
Running a business website?
Then every second your website is down is a second where you’re not making sales. That’s why you need a reliable platform.
Uptime, being one of the most important tests, also happens to be our favourite.
Features are useless if your website is unreachable! Uptime is the measure of the reliability of a platform - and this wouldn’t be an HD review without an uptime test...
Let’s look at testing done over a 12-month period, back in 2019 
.
The average monthly uptime was calculated to 99.96% - which places it among the top UK web hosting companies.
The more detailed view shows that their worst month had an uptime of 99.90% - still a very acceptable number.
This is likely due to their 24/7 network monitoring.
Network monitoring notifies the staff when a problem appears - so they can immediately work on a fix.
Combine that with their backup generators which will keep your website up and running even through a blackout - and you’ve got an unbeatable combination.
iPage Speed
Website speed is critical to your online success. There are quite a few benefits:
- Rank higher on Google
- Retaining more visitors
- Provide a better user experience
Rank higher on GoogleYes, Google long since confirmed they use website speed in their search ranking algorithms. It’s one of their top ranking factors.
To be exact, Google marks your website as slow when it takes more than 2.5 seconds to load on a 4G mobile connection.
But Google’s the least of your worries, studies show that for every second your website takes to load - conversions can drop by up to 20%.
To balance this iPage UK review, we need to see how iPage holds up during a few types of speed tests:
- Server Response Times
- Website Load Time
- Multi-Visitor Stress Test
Server Response Time
Server response time is the time it takes for the server to recognize you’ve asked for a website and start serving it to you.
This is critical because it’s not up to you.
Server speed can only be improved on the server-side. (Here, Bitcatcha was used - a popular service for testing server response times.)
iPage handles this quite nicely. Here are the worldwide response times.
Website Load Time Test
The second test is all about website load speed.
This should at least be under 3 seconds to be considered anywhere near good. (Powerful Pingdom tools for website testing were used, here.)
iPage did absolutely amazing in this test.
And that’s even when dealing with a huge page size of 4.3 MB - which is more than the average page size.
Multi-Visitor Stress Test
Awesome scored during speed test quickly lose their merit if the speed falls down during a visitor spike.
Quite a common thing which is bound to happen.
This - being our most important test of this iPage review - was conducted using a tool called LoadImpact.
LoadImpact simulates 25 visitors on the page, sending multiple requests per second.
As you can see, in the end - the website is receiving over 500 requests per second from 25 virtual users - all while keeping a response time of around 50MS.
With the exception of that one spike at the beginning, iPage passes this test with flying colours.
If these speed tests are anything to go by - iPage is a great hosting provider that offers amazing speeds.
Even when dozens of visitors are on the page simultaneously, they are solid.
iPage Pricing
You’re probably reading this iPage UK review because the price pulled you in.
Still, you questioned whether they offered a great service...
Let’s find out.
Available Plans
There’s no iPage free hosting - let alone quality free hosting - option, but the shared hosting plans come pretty close.
We get the message. Quality comes at a price here.
But all hosting plans do come with an iPage Free Domain starter - to help save you some starting costs.
Here are their three shared hosting plans:
- The one-size-fits-all shared hosting plan - starting at £1.59/month.
- WP Starter - starting at £3.00/month
- WP Essentials - starting at £5.56/month
These plans offer various features, although they have a few things in common:
- Unlimited Storage
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Unlimited Domains
- iPage Free Domain - for 1 Year
But what’s the difference between them?
The main difference is that they’re aimed at different users.
The one-size-fits-all hosting plan, which you see on the home page, is aimed at inexperienced individuals and businesses.
These are the guys who just want to get their website going.
This plan comes with their in-house built drag-and-drop website builder of great quality and thousands of free templates to build your website with.
It also includes other features inexperienced users might find hard to implement by themselves, like analytics. The one-click installer gets quite a few apps up-and-running for you, in one go, including:
- WordPress
- phpBB
- Joomla
As for the other two plans, they’re hosted on WordPress-optimized servers and allow for higher speed and security when running WordPress.
If you plan to use WordPress, these are the plans you should go with.
WP Starter
This is the cheaper plan of the two best WordPress host packages - it includes all the common things such as unlimited bandwidth, storage, and domains.
On top of that, it comes with a customized control panel which is optimized for WordPress.
You also get themes and plugins pre-installed with your WordPress website, to make your setup that much easier.
WP Essentials
This plan offers everything the WP Starter plan offers with some welcomed additions:
- WordPress Expert Support
- Automatic Malware Removal
- SiteLock Professional Security
All these features make up for a much smoother experience when building and maintaining your website - there’s very little you need to worry about.
Bonus Features
Our Top Standout Perk Picks
iPage does offer some features that most other hosting companies don’t really offer - and it’s our job to tell you about those in this iPage review.
iPage Bandwidth, Email Support, and Storage
iPage has configured their hosting infrastructure in such a way that they can offer scalable bandwidth with their three cheap plans.
Scalable is basically just a fancy word for unlimited.
This means that they don’t offer fully unlimited bandwidth - say 300GB - but it means that it won’t matter for 99.95% of customers.
Their hosting plans also include unlimited professional emails using your own domain.
This comes bundled with autoresponders and email forwarding. You can log in to the emails using the iPage webmail application.
Storage is also unlimited with iPage webmail.
And you won’t ever be limited with their shared hosting plans. The terms on this are that you only use your storage for website-related files - which is what you need.
iPage Review of Customer Support
The short version is that support is top-notch.
The knowledge base has lots of articles divided into 14 separate categories - which contain 419 articles at the time of writing.
When it comes to speaking to actual human beings - iPage offers the options of Live Chat and Phone Support.
Combine this with their 24/7 customer support team - and you can get in touch with them in less than two minutes.
With the WP Essentials hosting plan, you also get access to expert WordPress technicians.
iPage Domain: Is It Free?
Web hosting without a domain is virtually useless. That’s why iPage makes it easy to purchase a domain with all of their hosting plans.
All of iPage’s hosting plans do come with a free domain for 1 year - which saves you about £14 in the first year.
iPage FAQs
Find the Most Commonly Asked Questions Here…
Still, have some questions this iPage review didn’t answer?
We’ve prepared a few simple and informative answers which will satisfy some of your worries about iPage 
Where Are iPage Servers Located?
iPage’s servers are located in their data centres in Boston, MA.
These data centres feature over 800 servers and more than half a petabyte of storage. (Some day, they will get into the premium reseller hosting game, like Amazon.)
They’re armed with 24/7 security to protect from criminals.
N+1 redundancy to make sure your data is always safe, and state of the art network architecture and equipment.
All of these measures are to make sure you always receive a satisfying experience.
How Much Does iPage Really Cost?
iPage’s pricing is very transparent and real.
Their pricing starts with a hefty discount for the first term and then renews at regular prices. The good thing is that the initial term can be as long as three years.
You could get three-year hosting for as low as £1.59/month.
The renewal prices can hit you by surprise if you didn’t read them before purchasing, but they’re all showcased on the website - no hidden fees.
Does iPage use cPanel?
cPanel is not the primary hosting administration panel that iPage uses.
Instead, they use vDeck - which is a good alternative to cPanel, although it is missing a few features and is a bit harder to use.
Experienced users might be mad when they see this, as you get complete control of your website once you learn how to use cPanel properly.
Their knowledge of it allows them to bounce between hosts with no hassle.
Conclusion 🔍
Our iPage review experts basically agree.
iPage provides so-so performance for a very affordable price. Even though it doesn’t come with cPanel on the cheaper plans - you still get unlimited storage, bandwidth, and domains - rivaling those of the best UK web hosting options available.
All at a low price - which is a rare sight - until you see the renewal price.
There’s no iPage free hosting option, but the service is of great quality, and an iPage free domain is included in the price.
Definitely good enough for small businesses and freelancers.
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