General
IPowerweb is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world since 1998 serving over 250,000 customers at the moment. Their goal is to provide all the features you need in a single package without having to purchase additional stuff. Since the beginning, they have always competed to offer one of the best values in web hosting
Their Business Pro web hosting plan is a generous ecommerce ready web hosting package that includes 3000 MB of disk space, 3000 GB of bandwidth and 2500 Emails for only $7.95 per month. Free domain and setup is even included with a one year prepayment.
As the company expanded, they have also promoted another brand called IPower, which is exactly the same as Ipowerweb. The only difference between the two is the interfaces of the two website with IPower looking much more intuitive since it is newer.
| Plan Features | Ipowerweb |
|---|---|
| Disk Space | 300 GB |
| Bandwidth | 3000 GB |
| FTP Accounts | unlimited |
| CGI-BIN, Perl & SSI | Yes |
| PHP | Yes |
| Frontpage Extensions | Yes |
| Raw Log Files | Yes |
| Platform OS | Windows |
| Control Panel | Custom |
| Web Stats | Webalizer, AWStats |
Control Panel
What impresses us most is the Vdeck control panel which was custom designed by Ipowerweb. The control panel is very sleek and very stable compared to the control panels designed by many non-web hosting companies. Because Ipowerweb is a web hosting company itself, they are one of the very few companies who have decided to create their own control panel rather than use a third-party solution such as CPanel, Hsphere or Ensim.
Vdeck is also the easiest and most versatile control panel we have ever used. This control panel basically allows you to manage every aspect of the website and comes complete with easy-to-follow tutorials, iPage web builder with over 150 beautiful templates and a marketing center.
Customer Service
They provide the most options of contacting their customer support. They provide Email Support, Live Chat and Toll-Free Support. We emailed their customer service support department with our paid test account and we got a response back within 10 minutes, which was fantastic. We called Toll-Free Support, and the response we received was thoroughly, but we were on old when called at 12:00 PM (peak hours) for ten minutes. As for Live chat, they representatives were present and extremely helpful during 8:00 AM , 12:00 PM and 5:00 PM when we initiate the chat conversations.
Self-Help will probably save you more time since they have every possible question one may ask in a knowledge base system. You just type in a question, and the system will bring up some relevant answers. You do not need to scroll the screen to view the questions and answers like other web hosts. Furthermore, they have hundreds of tutorials that are both walkthroughs and flash videos to assist you in configuring your email for your web host, modifying name DNS or even ftping into your website. These videos are important because they show you step by step on what to click in order to upload your files to your website. Most tutorials usually skip basic steps assuming you know what you are doing, but they tell you everything you need to know to begin viewing your website on the web.
Setup Time
Once we purchased an Ipowerweb account, our account was setup within thirty minutes before we received an email with our login and DNS information.
Pitfalls
We thought customer service over the phone can be improved during peak hours since we were on hold for over ten minutes. On the other hand, when we called at night or in the morning we were able to connect to a representative instantly. We were unable to find much faults with this host.
Strengths
Ipowerweb is one of the few competitors who offer free domains for purchasing just one year of web hosting. This is a $10 value. Furthermore, they include anonymous FTP, which a lot of web hosts charge for which permits you to allow visitors to download files from your FTP account without a password for a public directory. You can even use this to have your site visitors to upload files to you
They also provide comprehensive tools for your website to get you started including their IPage web building tool and comprehensive marketing center. The IPage web building tool has over 150 templates. These templates are the most beautiful templates we have ever seen and they are definitely professional looking. We build a few sites with these templates, and no one could even tell they were template based. The marketing center also had a lot of articles and free tools regarding promoting your website. Tools include a bad link checker which checks for bad hyperlinks on your website and a website submission tools that submits your website to all the major engines. There is no longer a need to purchase these tools separately since they are all provided with this complete web hosting package.
Our Opinion
If reliability, features and world-class hosting is at the top of your list, Ipowerweb’s business pro web hosting plan is the plan for you. For $7.95 a month, you have all the tools you need to succeed online at a price that will just get you hosting elsewhere. Powerful help tools, helpful customer services and years of experience in the industry allows us to give them the editor’s choice for the best web host.
