Web Hosting Reviews – The Bowdon Bulletin

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There are a number of hosting companies that promise to provide optimal value, rapid page loads and 99.9% uptime. Moreover, many of these providers have nearly identical pricing schemes, making it difficult for companies to determine which options are best for the money. If any of this sounds familiar, you may be asking the question, “Is iPage hosting any good?” Following is everything you want to know about this hosting service and the different hosting plans that it currently provides.

Pricing

With their high-value, introductory offers, iPage offers some of the lowest priced hosting services in its class. More often than not, people only need to search the home page of this company in order to locate the latest, limited-time promotions. As soon as old offers expire, new discounts are added and thus, new subscribers rarely have to pay full price for the plans and special features that they purchase.

Standard Offers

There are a number of impressive features that come standard with all iPage hosting plans. These include free site building tools, free security suite, free domain registration, free online store and unlimited email addresses and disk space. Among some of the core features supplied by their web hosting packages are unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains and scalable bandwidth. The Drag and Drop Builder is also available to make site creation simple and hassle free. Subscribers are also given a free, personalized domain name for one full year. Packages even come with the Photo Gallery Setup Wizard and the Blog Setup Wizard. Thus, no matter what your intentions may be, you’re certain to get a comprehensive hosting and site building solution when working with this company.

Online Store

This is one of the best hosting companies to work with when setting up an online store. You will get your choice of shopping cart. Your store will also come with PayPal integration.

Customer Support

A hosting service is only as good as the level of customer support that it provides and this remains true even when a company like iPage offers an expansive array of impressive features as standard. iPage has a variety of ways for subscribers to connect with its support team. These include an online ticketing system and support center, guided tutorials that show new customers how to use their accounts and email, phone and chat support 24 hours per day and seven days per week. Customer service team members undergo rigorous QA testing and iPage asserts that support calls are typically answered in about one minute.

Marketing Tools And Advertising Credits

iPage also provides its customers with a number of impressive marketing tools and advertising credits. They routinely provide up to $250 in advertising value for both Yahoo and Google. The also supply access to comprehensive, online marketing guides, a free toll-free phone number for US clients and a free Yellowpages.com listing. Thus, not only can you count on this company to give you the tools you need to build an impressive site, but you can also rely on iPage to help you market your new website as well.

Drawbacks

There are, however, a few drawbacks of working with iPage hosting, particularly for those who are less technically inclined. This site and its services are primarily catered to people who are familiar with the nuances and demands of web development. Those who have never built their own websites before and who haven’t used hosting services and hosting tools in the past, will likely find themselves growing frustrated at some point in the design process. This is largely due to the fact that iPage does not have cPanel and instead uses its own panel interface which takes time to learn.

Bottom Line

Even with its impressive discounts, iPage is not the cheapest hosting service out there, but it is among the lowest priced. With a wealth of features being offered as standard, this company also provides extraordinary value. The only real drawback is the lack of cPanel and the fact that iPage is best-suited to seasoned designers. Thus, if you happen to be tech-savvy and want to get an amazing range of features with a basic, affordable hosting plan, this could be the best company for you.

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A web host is the most important link between site owner and site visitors. If hosting services are less than stellar, a site’s user experience is highly likely to be low and vice versa. A bad user experience is known to cause once loyal visitors to leave in droves with little or no likelihood of ever returning.

As such, selecting the Hub Web Hosting company should be a well thought out process. Here are four important considerations when selecting a web host:

Security

In the past, security was more of an afterthought in the web hosting industry trumped by factors such as pricing and bandwidth. However, recent high profile data breach events have refocused the spotlight on security. According to data published by the Ponemon Institute in September 2014, 43% of companies in the US had experienced a data breach in the preceding 12 months. Worryingly, this figure had increased by a staggering 10% year-on-year. With this in mind, select a Hub Web Hosting firm that offers real-time data protection. This should include daily malware scans, continuous traffic monitoring, denial-of-service mitigation, SSL and HTTPS, robust firewall, and the best anti-virus technology.

Continuous Maintenance and Updating

The tech industry landscape has a legendary reputation of moving at a speed unmatched by other industries. A good example is the Docker containerization technology, which was unheard of a few years ago. However, it has taken the tech industry by storm becoming more or less a standard/benchmark in its own right. For this reason, it is wise to choose a web host who keeps abreast of industry developments and continuously updates applications, software, and other tools required to provide seamlessly smooth services to clients. Remember, failure to update tools that developers use to keep their sites running such as PHP, Perl, Joomla, and MongoDB degrades site performance and increases likelihood of data breaches.

Data Backup

The most important resource a site has is the data stored in Hub Web Hosting servers. You can think of this data as the attraction that keeps visitors coming back repeatedly. If it were lost irretrievably due to hardware/software failure or hacking, there would be no reason for web users to visit the same site. To avoid becoming another data loss statistic, choose a hosting company that offers data backups. This makes it easy for host to restore clients’ data and resume operations even after losing all data stored on servers at a specific or across multiple locations. The general rule of thumb is to make sure hosting firm persistently backs-up data in more than one location. Such a host can recover client data even if it is irrecoverable from servers and primary data backup point.

Features

Before signing up for a web-hosting package, find out more about the feature you can expect to access. In addition, make sure those features suit your site’s current technical requirements and future growth needs. To start with, find out amount of disk space allocated to Hub Web Hosting package you are eyeing. For a newly launched site that does not yet have a lot of content, disk space of about 10GB would be enough. Another important feature is bandwidth, which largely depends on site architecture and traffic. Other features to evaluate include pre-installed apps and widgets, email accounts, database support, frameworks, shell access, Cron jobs, ability to add .htaccess files, language support, and easy third-party app/software/framework installs.

Conclusion

The company you choose to host your site literally holds the key to success or failure of your web-based venture. For this reason, the most important factors to consider when selecting one include security, features, data backup, as well as continuous maintenance and updating of server hardware/software.

Learn more about Hub Web Hosting.

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The Bowdon Bulletin

Category: Web Hosting Reviews

Is iPage Hosting Any Good?

Why Hub Web Hosting Hub is a Good Choice