iPage reviews – Page 4

Read The Others, Believe This One

First, let me disclaim...I am the owner and editor of PJFusco On The News, a conservative blog. As an uptight, squeeze-butt right-winger, I am difficult at the best of times in the best of moods, I have two ex-wives to prove it, and have authored several books to underscore precisely what I am saying. If nothing else however, I will not prevaricate, ever, so the following review of Ipage is spot on in every regard.

Is Ipage perfect? Not by a long shot, but neither are any of the others, and I've been with several. But Ipage makes the effort to become better, if not perfect. In fact, if it wasn't that they seem to be earnest in their desire for feedback, I might be inclined to say they are annoying. For example, I had an issue with domain registration, I moved it from another provider, but you know how that goes. It is difficult, not matter how they try to streamline the process. So I went on the chat feature at Ipage in their support area. Don't know who the person was, can’t remember, but the problem was solved. Anyway, not ten minutes later I receive an email from someone at Ipage imploring me to render feedback on the chat session. So I did, commenting on the negatives and positives in the experience. So far, so good.

But I've had other issues, and on two occasions I've been very dissatisfied with the person with whom I was chatting, once because he had no clue what I wanted, and the other because Ipage was having a problem with their email and this guy apparently thought it best to make excuses rather than discuss the issue. In the end he told me it was a "temporary problem" which is bull-hockey because it is an ongoing, albeit intermittent problem with Ipage and apparently they know it. One time I went to find out what was wrong with my email and they had posted in the chat window something to the effect they knew about it and were working on it. Okay, no big deal I suppose. I can live without email for ten minutes at a clip I suppose.

Now let's talk about value for the dollar. I'm not sure I'm allowed to discuss competitors, but I don't think, if you have any experience whatsoever with the big guys, one big daddy in particular, you will need to conjure up very many images beyond the fact their entire service is as lousy as a jakey-bum on Sterno. Not so Ipage. I mean, I couldn't give a hoot or a holler for the windmill thing (they are proudly powered entirely by windmill produced electric energy...whoopee), but I will tip my hat to the services they provide at the price they charge. If it isn't "excellent", let's say, It's as good, if not better than any of their competitors." You get extreme value for your dollar.

Ease of use? Excellent. I have a business partner who has the hardest head in the world when it comes to change. He wanted to use another service at three times the price. I didn't have time to argue, so I gave him my "okay" figuring, how bad could it be?" Well, it was bad, stinking rotten bad. It took me an hour and a half and three chat sessions just to get the emails set up. Ridiculous. With Ipage? Ten minutes and no help because only an idiot would need help after a cursory perusal of Ipage's instructions.

Here's the bottom line (because I've already written enough for a short-story): you could do worse with another provider, but I do not think you could do better than Ipage. Yes, they will annoy you at times, but they are voracious when it comes to feedback (sometimes I get three emails from one guy asking me to take a survey), and they are courteous, helpful, respectful, and in your corner. What else could you ask for from a provider?

Biggest Pro: High value for dollars spent in comparison to competitors
Biggest Con: Sporadic, annoying technical issues, e.g. email is intermittently interrupted

Unbelievable service for a great price

I don't usually take the time to do reviews, but after the unbelievable service I got from iPage, I had to find a way to reward them. I have had my service for 1 year. When I first signed up, everyone was very friendly and easy to deal with. They did not push any extray services on my unlike other sites. They did walk me through the options though. Afterwords, I could not believe they were a third the price of the company I was going to use. After a year, I have closed my business, but I wanted to keep my email address. They did not push me to reconsider or try to get me to pay for any "lesser" services. Instead the found a way to get me what I was looking for at no cost. I highly recommend iPage to anyone looking for someone to host their site.

Biggest Pro: Unbelievable customer service at a great price
Biggest Con: None so far

The only good thing is their support

I signed to iPage after seeing grades from other web sites. It is the first web hosting for me and it is very hard to find a descent one with all that promotional sites, each of them has its very different top list.
I loved iPage's control panel and I installed a Joomla website. But site was very slow to load, sometimes it didnt load at all and I got a blank page. The FTP connection disconnects every seconds and trying to manage my site through it takes ages, cause every action you make, the FTP client has to reconnect, sometimes it takes a minute to connect.
I contacted several times about it, I got fast replies (in 20 minutes), They said they fixed the problem, and they did, for a couple of hours. I asked to get a refund, and I got it minus the months I used thei service.

Biggest Pro: good support
Biggest Con: Slow speed

Cheap hosting, great support, absolutely horrible service

Like many fresh young webmasters, we started out with Godaddy. They were good, expensive, but good. A little hard to understand at times, but good. Time for renewal and we do some research. One of the tops on the list at the time (and not this site) was Ipage. They were cheap, they were easy and had a decent review.
In the few months that we've had them our website has gone down at least once a week. Sometimes it was our fault, admittedly, but more times than not it was theirs. Just recently our site went down and was down for almost 3 days. It recently came up this Sunday, and today, Tuesday our site is down for the second time today. Every time we try to chat with someone online, they are terrible and can never help us. Pick up the phone and they're golden. Until the service can catch up with the support they need to give it a rest.

Biggest Pro: Price
Biggest Con: DOWNTIME

Server down, pages not loading, LOSING BUSINESS

I selected iPage becuase of the great reviews I have seen. But I have to tell you it has been absolutely horrible. My pages wont load sometime and others I get partial page loads. I am losing business. I have not had a single sell during the last several days while the server has been acting up. I am sure my customers are getting disgusted with the site perfomance. It is time to find a new service provider.Now I have to go through the baggage of moving my website, what a pain!

Biggest Pro: Cheap, but you get what you pay for
Biggest Con: Server performance issues

Awful.

"Anytime money back guarantee" fail. They won't give you any money back. They have a mysterious cancellation fee that appears :) No refund for your free domain.

My site crashed randomly at least 5 times, always the same problem, always the same flawed solution by "tech support".

Cheap hosting? Sure, but you get what you pay for.

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: they just lie a lot

Horrible provider

iPage is one of the worst providers I've ever used, and I've used Powweb

I went in not expecting much and they still disappointed me.

I figured it would run my wifes wordpress blog just fine.
1 MySQL database, some php, that's it. It's not like her blog is even that popular.
But, no, that was too much for it. They've oversold their servers to the point where
even some of the basic web pages I made would take 5 minutes to load.

Take my advice, stay away.

Biggest Pro: Um... cheep, I guess.
Biggest Con: out of all the issues... probably the database timeouts.

Worst hosting provider imaginable

Their non-standard admin panel (they don't have Cpanel) and their shaky/unreliable/janky "Install Central" service are fatally flawed. Their install central simply ate our web-site. "Oh well!" says the support agent.

Piss-poor isn't even close to negative enough to describe how terrible the attitude of their support people are.

Oh, and "Install Central" doesn't generate any kind of "log" or "receipt email"--see also SimpleScripts for an example of how this function should work.

Biggest Pro: I guess it sort of works.
Biggest Con: Support, Customer Service, Admin panel all flat-out suck.

Don't use if you require a database!

So far, I have been with IPage for 3 weeks. In that time, my site has been down for 10-15 minutes at least 4 times a week, that I am aware of. The problem is that they have overloaded their database server, and my site main page needs to use it, as does my message board, an integral feature of my site. At first they kept denying that they even had a problem. Today, however, the support person I spoke with (by the way, don't count on getting one that is fluent in english and easy to understand) told me that they had a "temporary problem with the database for the last 10 minutes". When I told them this had happened numerous times, and asked their solution, she simply said "we have solution" and at that point quit communicating with me. I think I'll be switching host's. At least they do have a money-back guarantee. I'll be using it!

Biggest Pro: Money back guarantee.
Biggest Con: Out-sourced tech support

Constant down time and server issues

I started with iPage because I saw good reviews elsewhere and they were cheap for unlimited access. I regret the decision now. They not only screwed me when I first signed up and automatically charged me for a bunch of additional security crap that I didn't need, but my site is SLOW and is only live randomly because of "database issues". My site is not large, it's run through a wordpress theme, and takes FOREVER and a day to load, when it's up. Unless you want to pay for a dedicated server (which I don't have experience with and can't guarantee it'll work) I would suggest staying away from iPage. I do, however, applaud their attempts at being green by using wind powered energy!

Biggest Pro: "green" energy
Biggest Con: Server speed & database reliability is horrible