Bob says: I just read your go daddy vs. ipage review and had a question. I am looking to open a website retail store with product lines and shopping cart. Can you tell me your thoughts in these 2 companies for what I am looking for.
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ddubbua says:
What software were you planning on using for your shopping cart? If you hadn’t decided yet, the two I recommend are Magento or Drupal Ubercart. With that said, I’d never run either on GoDaddy’s standard web hosting. We’ve setup a Drupal install on iPage for one client @ http://www.altstarcraft.com/alt-tv. As you can see it loads ok, but could load a lot quicker. The problem that I find with standard web hosting is that providers tend to load up servers with too many sites until the server is under such a load that all the sites start to run slow. It’s kind of like opening 150 word docs on your computer: each one isn’t much of a load for your computer, but with them all running you start going cray with how hard it is just to write out a new document.
It boils down to you get what you pay for. I’d place Go daddy’s standard hosting at the bottom, then iPage, then a provider that offers more dynamic services. Go daddy now offers what they call “4th Generation Hosting” I haven’t looked into it much yet but it sounds like something that would work better for use with a shopping cart. The problem is that shopping carts require a lot of the server. Two companies that I’ve been impressed with are inmotion hosting: we’ve got a client running a Magento site with them that responds very well, and rackspace: we have multiple Drupal installs that perform very well on their servers.
The tradeoff is cost: for one of these hosting providers you’ll be looking to pay $50 to $100/mo. If you have a good amount of traffic coming to your website the better hosting will probably pay for itself because you’ll have a better conversion rate with a more responsive site.
Thank you for your review. I’m kinda in the same situation; trying to leave godaddy for a better, most of all, faster solution. I also lean toward ipage, because I’ve read their speed is amongst the highest, but now I’m wondering if that’s true. It’s hard to find trustable reviews from users with their own experience. Thanks for your insight. May I ask with whom you host now? Can you already feel a difference? If you don’t want to write here, feel free to drop me an email.
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The more I experience anything with goDaddy hosting the more I hear about people leaving them. For $3.50/mo I still recommend iPage and I’m currently still using them. The 2 year introductory period ends this year and I’m debating if the service is worth it for $7.95/mo. I’m thinking probably not. I wouldn’t go to the extend of saying that their speeds are the highest, I like them because of the value they are for the first 2 years. You’ll definitely like them over GoDaddy. I’m thinking after the 2 year introductory period I’ll be going with WebFaction. It is hard to find trustworthy reviews because iPage offers a referral program (which is a nice perk), but people become overzealous to oversell the service. Not the fastest but much faster than GoDaddy, Great support, Great Value @ $3.50/yr or 2.50/yr. Any feedback on the speed of this site would be appreciated. I use w3 total cache (a wordpress plugin) to keep it going faster.
Hello,
I know this post is old, but I am presently hosting with ipage and have been for three years. I build websites for my customers and then add them to my dashboard and charge them a direct fee. I am finding this to be cumbersome and am considering using the affilliate program. Any suggestions? The up side to the way I do it is I can host as many websites as I want, so I don’t have to worry about promotional prices.
Thanks for any insight.
Eileen
I just switched from GoDaddy (not worthy of a link) to iPage hosting.
So far here’s my rating for iPage Hosting:
Customer Service:
Cost:
Green:
Quality of Product:
Why I like iPage Hosting
Shared hosting at a cheap price is what drew me in. $3.50/mo for the first 2 years. I could put all my domains and more on the hosting and have as many applications as I wanted for only $3.50/mo. In two years it’s going to raise to
$6.95$7.95, but I’m thinking at that rate that’s reasonable enough for a per year price.UPDATE: It’s almost two years later and the standard price has risen to $7.95. While the discounted price of $2.50 or $3.50 remains a fantastic deal I’ve moved all my sites as there are better values out there for $7.95 a year.
Some other perks of the hosting is that you have 100% green hosting, a free domain while you host with them and the customer service is dedicated to get to you within 5 minutes or so. I’ve tried the customer service live chat 4 times now and they’ve always gotten to me within 2 minutes. They are very helpful and always resolve my problems which were just adjusting to the learning curve.
Why I left GoDaddy
I started out with Godaddy because it was a suggestion of a professor. I didn’t really know any other hosting companies. As I progressed from plain HTML and hand crafted php documents and started using WordPress I found that GoDaddy did an AWFUL job of accessing it’s database servers. Updating a page took a painstaking amount of time. If I ever had to log into my account it took forever to find what I was looking for, then customer service takes hours to get back to you. The cost for one site was OK after using coupon codes, but now that I have many domains to host the cost was terrible for terrible hosting, and that was the end of GoDaddy for me.
Affiliate Account
One of the things that makes iPage a great company to work with is that they offer an affiliate program. I’ve had their hosting for a year now and finally got a check for $105! It’s not much and certainly not the best way to make money online, but it’s enough to pay what they charge for hosing for 2 years. So full disclosure, I am an affiliate and the first link in this article is an affiliate link, but up till now I support iPage and think they’re a great value at $3.50/mo.