Web.com is a large provider of web hosting, marketing and website building service while iPage focuses on offering cheap web hosting. This comparison is made between the 2 companies' shared hosting packages to figure out which company is the better choice for personal websites and small online businesses.
To clarify the details, we have deeply analyzed the services' pricing, web hosting features, uptime, speed, technical support and customer satisfaction rates. Based on our investigation and long-time monitoring on the companies' web hosting performance, we have given unbiased ratings in the following table to show the edges and limitations.
For more information about the 2 companies, read in-depth iPage review or Web.com review.
Rating | ||
---|---|---|
Plan in Comparison | Essential Hosting | Essential Plan |
Overall | ||
Features | ||
Loading Speed | ||
Reliability | ||
Technical Support | ||
Recommended | ||
Website | Web.com | iPage.com |
Plan & Pricing
Web.com has a sum of 3 web hosting plans named as Essential Hosting, Professional Hosting and Premium Hosting. The price of the plans is $5.95/mo, $7.95/mo and $9.95/mo respectively, which is acceptable in the industry. 1 free domain is included as extra. The only demerit is that there is no upgrade choice when websites grow beyond shared hosting.
iPage offers a single Essential Plan for people in need of the power of shared hosting. The regular price of the plan is $8.99/mo, while the current one starts from $1.68/mo for people going through the following promotional link to make subscriptions. An 81% discount is available.
Besides, there are a large number of extras, including more than $200 advertising credits, free SiteLock and 1 free domain. The shared plan can be upgraded to VPS or dedicated server at any time. Moreover, iPage provides an anytime money back guarantee which allows customers to request a refund when cancelling account.
Features & Tools
Web.com provides customers with many features that are needed to get websites up and running. The company supports 1-click install of blogs, automatic backups and a large number of open source applications. Besides, an easy-to-use control panel and multiple programming languages including Ruby on Rails, Perl, PHP, Python and phpMyAdmin are fully covered. However, the service from this company is a little limited in server resources.
The Essential Plan from iPage, according to our review, is not only affordable, but also rich-featured. It is packed with a Weebly site builder, daily spam protection, Secure FTP, and vDeck control panel which is one of the best in its kind. Besides, there is a website backup software which enables people to easily backup and restore their websites.
As for the details about the features included in the 2 companies' services, read the following table.
Feature | ||
---|---|---|
Plan in Comparison | Essential Hosting | Essential Plan |
Disk Storage | 300 GB | Unlimited |
Email Addresses | 10 | Unlimited |
Monthly Data Transfer | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Free Domain | 1 | 1 |
FTP Accounts | 25 | Unlimited | PHP 5 |
Perl | ||
MySQL Databases | 25 | Unlimited |
Secure FTP | ||
Cloud Storage | N/A | 1 GB |
Regular Price | $5.95/mo | $8.99/mo |
Discount | N/A | 81% |
Current Price | $5.95/mo | $1.68/mo |
How to Claim | Web.com | Link Activation |
Uptime & Speed
Web.com offers a guarantee of 99.99% uptime for Unix users and claims that the uptime calculation excludes scheduled maintenance, unexpected events outside the control of the company and problems caused by third parties. To check out where the guarantee is true in the real world, we have kept monitoring the company' service uptime for a couple of months and received the result that the figure in the past month averages 99.91%.
iPage, on the other hand, promises 99.9% uptime to ensure that customers' websites are consistently online. To cover the commitment, the company uses 2 state-of-the-art data centers both of which are housed with thousands of servers and equipped with 24×7 security and fully power redundancy. The monitored statistics of this company is as the following chart.
In addition to uptime guarantee, both of the companies have given pledges on fast hosting speed to make sure that blogs and businesses can gain good performance. However, our statistics collected from monitoring show that iPage surpasses its competitor much in server response speed. On average, Web.com consumes about 800ms in the past 30 days. For the results of iPage, read the real-time statistics in below.
Technical Support
Both of the 2 companies offer 24×7 support service for customers to seek help. They provide toll-free phone numbers and support emails to allow customers to contact an expert easily and quickly, and stay on Facebook, Twitter and some other social platforms to ensure more ways for people to ask for solutions to problems.
The only difference is that iPage inserts a live chat button on the official site while Web.com does not, which means that iPage customers have more means to get into contact with a support representative. Offered by most leading web hosting providers, live chat is now considered as one of the most convenient ways for technical support.
Which Is Better?
Based on the comparison of pricing, features, performance and support, we personally conclude that iPage has more edges in shared web hosting as the service from this company is much more affordable, reliable and fast. Most importantly, the money back guarantee makes the service risk-free.