iPower Review and Rating from Our Editors & Real Customers

iPower starts web hosting service in 1997. With over 10 years’ hardworking, however, it still suffers from a large number of complaints. To figure out why this happens, our editors make a comprehensive review on this company by looking through the basic but important elements of price, features, performance and technical support.

First, we carry out the following overall rating chart so that readers can easily grasp the rough information by a glance. These ratings are conducted in view of real customers’ feedbacks and our editors’ practical investigation.

Price & Features

Customers are told to choose from the 3 hosting plans: Starter plan, Pro plan and Pro plus. As is announced, the Starter is for small sites or blogs but the Pro plus is best for e-commerce business. The company persuades customers to go Pro, which is best valued. Details of plans are in below.

• Starter: $3.99/mo – 5 GB disk space, 250 GB bandwidth, $ 15.99/yr for personalized domain name, 1 domain allowed, 1 MySQL databases, no Shopsite.
• Pro: $3.95/mo – Unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 1 domain name, unlimited domains allowed, 25 MySQL databases, Shopsite with 15 products.
• Pro plus: $11.99/mo – Unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 3 domain names, unlimited domains allowed, 25 MySQL databases, Shopsite with 50 products.

Meanwhile, customers enjoy a 30-day money-back guarantee. In terms of payment, the Starter plan does not support PayPal, which is considered as the safest way for paying online.

Browsing through iPower homepage, we find that the company lists varieties of features up which make readers hard to get the most important information. Therefore, our experienced editors produced the following chart containing the most basic and advanced hosting features. Hope readers can check the point clearly.

Feature	Starter	Pro	Pro plus
DGI+PHP 4&5 support
Ruby on Rails
Secure FTP
Custom Cronjob
Perl Support
SSH
SSL
.htaccess

Too bad to see such a result that iPower misses so many useful and powerful features. iPower provides vDeck control panel, which has many limitations. First, it is relatively new to the market, so people may find it hard to get started. Second, requiring certain technical knowledge makes it not so easy to use.

Performance

iPower uses 100% wind power generation which is very eco-friendly. Moreover, it claims 99.9% uptime guarantee. In the past constant 30 days, the figure of what we have been observing is 99.89%, which ensured by 24/7 internet monitoring of technicians, the UPS power backup and diesel backup generator. Check the uptime chart beneath.

Actually, knowing from the real customers, the company does not fulfill its speed commitment because we did a survey on iPower hosting sites and come out the following information.

Technical support

iPower offers customers wholesome after-sale service. Any troubled customer has 3 options to contact the technical staff 24/7 via live chat, email and telephone. Before judging this company’s technical support, we’d like to tell readers our real experience on connecting the staff through live chat.

Most of the time from we click the live chat icon to get the answer, the time costs as long as 2-3 minutes, sometimes even longer. What we saw from the chat table is always “you are not currently in a chat session”. What awful waiting. Fortunately, the operator we contacted is nice and shows her good sense of responsibility.

Is iPower a reliable hosting company?

Not really. In fact, we searched many other reviews from both editors and verified customers on this host. The reputation on the company’s hosting uptime, speed and technical support is not so good, just as what we reviewed in the text.

Conclusion

For better sake, we decide not to recommend iPower as an ideal hosting company, because we believe readers won’t accept the fact that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Despite this poor host, we give some good alternatives. More details are listed in below to give readers the useful information.