Godaddy vs iPower - Cheap Shared Hosting Comparison

With over ten years of web hosting experience, both iPower and Godaddy have grown into established web hosts today. They offer a variety of hosting plans to millions of users across the global and they are especially favored by small and medium-sized companies.

Recently our editors find some good news for web hosting users, that is, both companies are offering grand discounts. If users sign up now, they may save as much as 50% of payments. However, it may be difficult for them to make a choice between the two. Therefore, we have carried out a detailed comparison of their Linux shared hosting plans from the aspects of pricing, features, uptime & speed, and customer support.

Plans and Pricing

Both companies offer 3 shared hosting plans to their customers. In iPower, the three plans are called Starter Plan, Pro Plan and Pro Plus priced at $3.99/mo, $4.99/mo and $11.99/mo. Currently, their Pro Plan is on sale charging only $3.95/mo for the initial term.

GoDaddy has named its shared hosting plans as Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate, with an on-sale price of $3.49/mo, $4.49/mo and $7.49/mo respectively. All the three plans are charging only half the regular rate. The price is affordable and the discounts are attractive indeed. Judging solely from price, GoDaddy is a notch above iPower.

Features

Then it comes to the features. We have chosen the most popular plan from each company to compare their features objectively. They are Pro and Deluxe. Both plans have a full package of features from the most basic ones to advanced technologies. Please refer to the table below to get a rough idea of their similarities and differences.

This table shows that each plan has its own merits and demerits. GoDaddy offers a more flexible control panel, a longer money back guarantee, and a more upgraded processor. On the contrary, iPower provides more email accounts and a free template based site builder, which can be very useful for business websites.

Besides these differences, we have also found more commercial features in the Pro Plan including Google Bonus, Facebook Advertising credits, PayPal integration, etc. In this sense, it is a better choice for hosting business websites. By the way, iPower uses wind power for their facilities in support of green hosting. This should be encouraged.

Uptime & Speed

Both companies have made great efforts to guarantee performance. In specific, iPower has set up two data centers with thousands of quality servers in Boston. Both data centers are run on N+1 power and equipped with 24/7 security. Besides, it has employed Cisco routers, UPS Power back-up, and diesel back-up generator to minimize possible risks. However, it doesn’t promise 99.9% uptime.

GoDaddy does better in this regard. It promises 99.9% uptime because it has all the elements to do so. It has three data centers located in US, Europe and Asia so that users can choose the nearest one for fast speed. The servers are backed up by redundant UPS power system and closely monitored for smooth and sound operation. Security measures such as fire protection and detection system are all in place to minimize the consequence of possible risks.

The 2 companies both have done a good job in stability. However, the speed is not so satisfying as our statistics collected from real-time monitoring show that neither of them performs excellently in this aspect. Read the following chart for detailed statistics.

Customer Support

As for customer support, iPower has a support team willing to offer help via phone, email and live chat 24/7. In their help center, users can find very helpful resources including an informative knowledge base, user guides, tutorials, etc.

In comparison, GoDaddy offers technical support via phone and email only. Live chat is not available. This is a big disadvantage because live chat is such an efficient channel available in most hosting companies.

Conclusion

Our comparison comes to the conclusion that neither of the two plans is perfect. iPower has more affordable price and richer features while GoDaddy may deliver better reliability, especially for users outside US. However, we can’t give you a definite answer ‘cause it really depends on your needs and budgets.

If you are determined to choose between them, we do think this is the right time. If you don’t, we are glad to recommend you more and better choices. These are three other web hosts who have proved to deliver superb shared hosting service.