iPower Hosting

Consider the name - little "i", big "Power": it says it all. Powerful web hosting for the little guy (and gal). iPower Web Hosting serves over 500,000 clients with its streamlined, low-frills packages designed to make web hosting fit the most frugal of budgets.

Except for the Starter Plan (which is a souped-up deal in its own right), all iPower hosting plans come with SSL, CGI, PHP, and MySQL, eCommerce enable, a rich marketing/content package, a website builder with templates, and credit towards advertising on the 2 top search engines ($30 towards Google, $50 towards Yahoo!).

iPower also offers Windows hosting plans, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, and merchant and web design service accounts.

Price Value iPower Hosting is proof-positive that big things come in small packages. Even the smallest of all their plans gives you all you need to get a family site or a blog started (5 gigs, for example, is enough disk space for storing hundreds of digital photos). For some, that's all they'll ever want or need. For that reason, we have to say iPower's Starter Plan is probably one of the smartest starter packages around. Sure, you have to pay $6.50 for your domain - but big deal! So-called "free" domains aren't really free anyway. Why pay for more features than you need (some you'll likely never use) just to save a few bucks on a domain? And though their numbers may be smaller than their competitors' (such as the amount of disk space and bandwidth that comes free with their plans), so are iPower Hosting's prices - not to mention that the average website owner doesn't really need nearly as much disk space and bandwidth as 99% of web hosting plans include anyway. Don't be misled by all the free stuff heaped onto various competitors' packages. Not everything that's free is worth having. And even small and mid-sized business owners will be pleased to get just what they need at an affordable price, without a bunch of unnecessary extras.

Reliability iPower Hosting boasts 4 Tier 1 data centers that run exclusively on AT&T's Global Crossing and Cable & Wireless' OC48 / OC192 Global IP backbones. Extensive public/private peering arrangements help magnify bandwidth capacity, internet reach, and performance optimization. They also use Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant servers, and Cisco & Foundry Firewalls and Routers. On-site security guards patrol the grounds 24/7 and utilize closed circuit television cameras inside and outside the building for total data and hardware protection. Access both to and from both the hosting and monitoring areas are secured by a "mantrap", or hardened, single-entry portals, preventing unauthorized personnel from ever making it into the building. Intrusion detection and filtering, and network monitoring and routing are ensured by the use of Network Operations Centers (NOC) with content mirrored in other NOCs for total failsafe system redundancy and diversity. Like the buildings' grounds, these NOCs are also staffed 24/7, in this case by expert analysts and technicians. Redundant dual AC and DC power feeds equipped with multiple backup systems, including generators should the power at iPower Hosting go out and an array of redundant, emergency environmental controls and protections make sure you're covered in case of unexpected crises.

Control Panel Former iPower Hosting clients and reviewers may recall that iPower used to use cPanel 5, but now they utilize their own vDeck control panel, which has received such acclaim for its versatility and ease of use that competing web hosts now rely on it as well. In fact, vDeck is often referred to as "revolutionary" and "the best of both worlds" by former cPanel and Plesk users. The best part of vDeck is that, since it's of iPower's own creation, they can tweak it, improve it, and fix bugs faster than any other web host that's using it could, as well as faster and better than they themselves could any other third party control panel. vDeck works best with Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher.

Customer Support iPower has a great series of topic-specific tutorials searchable FAQs for quickly finding your own answers to your questions, but if you require additional help, they're certainly there for you, with email query ticket support and a rapid response time.