Blogging is still alive and kicking so why not start hosting with a simple hosting service like iPage?
If you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, or anyone looking to build a website in this AI-ridden world, choosing the right web hosting provider is crucial.
As of 2024, iPage and Bluehost have officially become partners and all hosting for iPage now goes through the Bluehost platform.
While iPage has been around for decades as a budget-friendly option, a lot has changed in the hosting landscape.
In this comprehensive review, I’ll take an unbiased deep dive into iPage’s integration with Bluehost to determine if it’s still a viable choice or if you’re better off with an alternative.
To be fully transparent, I have hosted sites on iPage and Bluehos before so I will make sure I do not sugar-coat anything.
The iPage Pricing Breakdown
One of iPage’s biggest draws has always been its aggressive pricing, especially for new customers.
It is VERY HARD to find good hosting at a cheap price like iPage.
Their shared hosting plans used to be a rock-bottom rate of $1.99/month. However, with the Bluehost integration, it has now gone up to $2.95.
There are some important caveats to understand about this pricing:
- The $2.95 rate is a promotional price for the first term only when you sign up for at least 36 months. After that initial period, the renewal rates increase exponentially to $11.99/month on the basic plan.
- To get that $2.95 rate, you have to pay at least the full 1-year term upfront. That’s about $35 due immediately for the first year.
- Most of their affordable plans renew at much higher rates after the first term, jumping up to $11.99/month and higher for renewals on some higher tiers.
So while that $2.95 sticker price seems amazing on the surface, the pricing model employs some common tactics to attract new buyers with deep discounts before hitting them with dramatic price hikes on renewal.
This makes iPage an affordable short-term option, but a progressively more expensive long-term choice compared to some alternatives.
The iPage Unlimited Resource Breakdown
Another area where iPage has differentiated itself is its “unlimited” resource allocations. This is something that Bluehost also had so this is not something new for these two companies. Their lower-tier shared plans all advertise unlimited domains, disk space, bandwidth, databases, and more.
That sounds amazing for a $2.95/month host, right?
Well, not so fast.
While they don’t promote hard limits, iPage does implement fair usage policies and monitoring to prevent abusive usage of those “unlimited” resources.
According to their Terms of Service, they may temporarily limit, suspend or terminate your hosting if you consume what they deem to be excessive server resources, violate their Anti-Spam policies, or engage in other prohibited activities.
In practice, this means those “unlimited” allocations are soft caps that only apply to typical low-to-moderate usage levels. Once you start using significant resources by hosting larger sites, running resource-intensive applications like forums, or getting major traffic volumes, you’ll likely get throttled or shut down. So the unlimited claims are misleading at best.
iPage Performance & Reliability
Of course, while pricing and resources are important, performance and reliability are arguably the most critical factors for any web host.
Here’s an objective rundown of iPage’s offerings in these areas:
Site Speed
Based on independent data from reputable sources like IsItWP, iPage’s average global loading speeds sit around 1.4-1.8 seconds. That puts them in the middle-to-lower range for shared hosts, but not terribly slow either.
Uptime
Over the past year, iPage has maintained an impressive 99.98% uptime record with minimal outages according to monitoring data from UptimeRobot. That’s quite strong for a budget host.
However, with the Bluehost platform, it has been known to have a bit more downtime so you will want to keep an eye on that.
Infrastructure
Their hosting environment utilizes newer NVMe SSD storage and multiple data center locations for redundancy, which helps performance & reliability. However, their shared plans don’t utilize load-balanced CloudLinux, which higher-end hosts use to isolate accounts and stabilize node performance.
Overall, iPage delivers acceptable loading speeds and very good uptime for a low-budget provider. However, higher-tier hosts can still beat their performance in many cases.
The iPage+Bluehost Customer Support
To be very honest with you, Bluehost customer service is not known to be the best. So it will be interesting to see how iPage is going to resolve this issue now that they are partnered with Bluehost.
I must also admit that since I am now on Cloudways, I am a bit biased because of how amazing and fast the customer service has been.
I am also fortunate to have hosted successful and non-successful blogs in the past. This has given me a real insider view of hosting.
When it comes to iPage’s customer support, the reviews are very mixed:
Pros:
- 24/7 support available via phone, live chat & email
- Knowledgeable reps when you connect with higher-tier staff
- Fast initial response times
Cons:
- Many complaints of long hold times/delays
- Inconsistent support quality when reaching lower-tier reps
- Outdated and lacking knowledge bases & documentation
From analyzing iPage’s support channels, it seems their quality and training can be hit or miss. They have knowledgeable senior staff, but also seem to outsource some 1st-line support that provides subpar experiences.
From my own experience, I can also say that I noticed that it was a bit harder to reach support. Thankfully, I didn’t need to contact them too often. But now, after getting so much help from my current hosting service Cloudways, I see how important good support is.
Reliable, high-quality support is crucial for businesses, so this appears to be an area where iPage has room for improvement.
The iPage Extras & User Experience
Web hosts often try to differentiate themselves by offering bundled extras and user-friendly products. How does iPage stack up?
User Dashboard & Website Builders iPage’s control panel interface is powered by vDeck and provides a user-friendly way to manage hosting, emails, databases, and domains. They also include popular web builders like WordPress, Weebly, and their own website creator for easily building sites.
No issues here for beginners.
Free Domain
Many hosts offer a free domain name when you sign up for an annual plan at a minimum. iPage provides a free domain for the initial purchase term but charges a fee to keep the domain on renewals.
Free Email
Unlike some budget hosts, iPage did provide free email accounts with its hosting plan, allowing you to create professional emails@yourdomain.com. However, this is not something that is available on the Bluehost platform. Instead, you can add on the function for around $2.
Security & Extras
iPage includes a Patchman security tool to help automatically update WordPress and popular apps. They offer SiteLock security as an upsell, but don’t include free backups or robust security on basic plans.
Marketing Credits
One area where iPage provides extra value is by bundling credits for popular marketing tools like Bing Ads, ConstantContact email marketing, SiteScreamers SEO tools, and more on higher-tier plans.
As far as I can see, this will be carried over to their customers who join via Bluehost. However, it is unclear if this will be the case in the future.
Overall, iPage offers a fairly standard beginner-friendly experience and includes many of the basics. The marketing credits are nice add-on value, but top hosts often include more advanced security and backups even at entry-level pricing.
The Verdict
After this comprehensive look under the hood, my verdict is that iPage is still a decent budget option if your needs are very basic and limited strictly to the short term.
Their promotional pricing, unlimited resources, and user-friendly products make them appealing to those who need an inexpensive way to get started with a no-frills website.
However, I believe most businesses and professionals will quickly outgrow iPage and Bluehost due to their steeply increasing renewal prices, resource limitations, and inconsistent support quality.
This is exactly what happened to me.
The bigger my site got, the more problems I started to have.
These are drawbacks that many higher-rated and modestly more expensive hosts like Cloudways are able to address, while still keeping prices reasonable.
Overall, iPage can work for temporary sites and those with basic requirements on a tight budget. But savvier businesses will likely be better off finding a good mid-tier hosting provider that offers more reliable performance, better scalability, and premium service quality that iPage doesn’t provide at their low price points.
iPage isn’t a bad choice if you only need a barebones site hosted for a year or two and you’re okay with upgrading later.
Otherwise, I’d encourage spending a bit more for a host that can grow with your business long-term.
