You’ll no doubt remember from our previous post that we’d been having a few dramas with our webhosting over recent times. In that previous post we said that we’d ended up settling for the free X10hosting service as our provider. Unfortunately, X10hosting has continued to have significant downtime and in the end we’ve become really sick of it. Sorry X10hosting!
So, we started the investigation into hosting providers again. As I mentioned last time, I don’t make a lot of money, actually I don’t really make any money, from this blog (please keep clicking on those ads, every little bit helps!) and as such wanted a pretty cheap posting provider. Having exhausted all the recommended free providers I decided to try a couple of paid providers.
After doing some research, I selected two providers to try, iPage and StableHost. Below is my review of these two popular shared hosting providers.
iPage – A Slow Cheap Hosting Provider – 2.5 Stars
iPage is a cheap hosting provider that pushes its products very hard. If you do a Google for iPage review, you find a lot of shoddy reviews that one can only imagine are either paid by iPage or worst still written by iPage. Even knowing this, the price was cheap so I decided to give it a go. The hosting cost was $1 a month on their cheapest plan, so no exactly super expensive. You should be able to get the same $1 a month deal here if you want to give it a go.
So What do You Get for Your Massive $1 a Month Outlay?
- iPage’s own control panel – they don’t use cPannel – although I have to admit their control panel is actually pretty good
- PHP 5.3
- Unlimited MySQL Databases
- Unlimited disk space – within reason
- Unlimited monthly data bandwidth – although iPage’s speed will limit you – again this is within reason
- Free shared SSL certificates
- Email accounts
- Unlimited add-on (or extra) domains – i.e you can run multiple websites from the one account
- Install scripts for Joomla and WordPress etc.
We ran our website on iPage for a month or so and whilst they only had a small amount of downtime our website wasn’t exactly going to win any speed records! If you can get past the “fake” iPage reviews on Google you’ll notice a lot of people complaining about iPage’s speed – especially if you are using WordPress. Despite trying every caching plugin and anything else I could think I could make our site run at an acceptable speed on iPage.
Pros
- Cheap price – $1 a month – you should be able to get that price here.
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited databases
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Easy to use install engine
Cons
- Speed, speed and speed! iPage is horrendously slow! Everyone says it.