 iPowerWeb is a relatively recent addition to Best Host Review's Top 10. At first, we were sceptical of iPowerWeb’s generous offerings at such low prices. We’ve seen many hosts who offer seemingly unbelievable deals on hosting, until you try to use them for any serious period of time, only to discover that yes, you often do get what you pay for. We first reviewed iPowerWeb’s service last year. At that time we stopped evaluating them mid-stream on account of a few advertised features that had not, in any way, met our expectations. After keeping a close eye on them for awhile, we decided that they had improved considerably. We were right, as their current offerings have landed them in the #9 spot in our top 10.
Reliability
iPowerWeb has proven to be a pretty reliable host. We did experience a few brief periods of downtime and the occasional performance issue, but overall, it wasn’t bad. Only minor adjustments to the hosting environment were necessary to get all of the scripts we threw at them to work, which is good. They also utilize a diesel power backup generator, backups and optical backbones through multiple tier 1 providers, a definite plus.
Price Value
In terms of pricing and getting what you pay for, iPowerWeb is among the more generous shared hosts out there. They offer both Linux and Windows based hosting accounts, the former offering 200 gigs of web space and 2,000 gigs of transfer per month, the latter offering 100 gigs of web space and 1,000 gigs of transfer per month. Both plans provide for a free domain name registration, no setup fee with 12 and 24 month billing cycles and an enticing number of additional features, which include great marketing freebies such as $50 Advertising Credit for Yahoo! Search Marketing, $30 in Google AdWords Credits and a $100 Credit for Microsoft adCenter2. This is particularly unique and beneficial to those engaging in online commerce and marketing. This is a great value.
Control Panel
iPowerWeb employs the VDECK control panel system, an increasingly popular, powerful and easy to use solution. This is a big plus, as opinions of this system are positive. The control panel is elegant and clean and at least with iPowerWeb, performed well any time we used it. This is a serious factor, since an unstable control panel can leave you unable to correct a problem that may arise and there aren’t many things are frustrating as being unable to resolve one problem on account of another. This is, apparently, not something one needs to worry about with this host.
Customer Support
Our experience with iPowerWeb’s customer service was not bad, but not wonderful either. Their team can be reached 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, if you need immediate assistance, their email support will probably not cut it, as email requests may not be answered for around 24 hours. When initially calling their toll free support line, the person who helped us was friendly, but not much help when presented with a technical issue we created for the purpose of evaluating their support services. That was probably just a one-time bad experience because on subsequent calls to their phone support department, we did get very good and helpful assistance.
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