iPage vs Ixwebhosting
This article compares ipage and ixwebhosting side by side through real user experience. The comparison is solely generated by signing up their service then host website for various script testing. We test and monitor website performance, server uptime and tech support side by side. What you see below is what we personal experienced.
iPage and ixwebhosting are two of the popular cheap web hosting providers who can provide rich feature hosting plans at low costs. However, they're definitely configured to work with different website purpose.
iPage vs Ixwebhosting for Speed
Ixwebhosting wins when referring to server speed. I'm not sure if its because of my ISP routings here in Hongkong or their data center specifications, the site on ix hosting server is much faster than another one from ipage. Even their official site response got huge difference in loading speed. Here's a basic ping results
On my local I have 10M internet speed and most websites can be opened fastly so it's obviously not my local issue. The ipage server might be too busy because of huge traffic or there's some routing problem between my ISP to their data center.
iPage vs Ixwebhosting for plan features
Both win on service features. iPage is most well known for its all in one hosting plan where every customer recieves equal resources. Ixwebhosting still highlights their service by offering lots of dedicated IPs while its an expensive service from most other hosting companies.
Although we get different management control panel softwares for website setup, we don't find a problem in using each functions there. Especially for ixwebhosting, the h-sphere control panel got rid of most useless tabs and just remains what user really needed. You can't really find a more clean control panel system than this one.
The both company provides free domain name, unlimited storage space and mysql database. Everything like system OS and softwares are updated with latest stable versions. We have worked on test sites on both servers for over 1.5 years and no security issue founded so far.
The crucial difference is about server upgrade opportunity after you outgrew shared server. They both provides upgrade service to managed VPS and dedicated servers. However, ipage definitely provides better price and server features. For example we can get 1GB RAM with 40GB disk size plus 1TB montly traffic at $19.99/mo. But the price is almost twice more from ix company.
Another point I like to mention is both sites are very popular in China. Especially ix site, they even developped a Chinese version with Chinese tech support for users in this area. Lots of ix staffs are from China as I know of. Because they provide lots of dedicated IPs, many web development groups use this offer to host websites for their clients and sell via good price.
iPage vs Ixwebhosting for Support
As referring to support, there's no much difference on either end. To be more specific, they only provide basic online support. Live chat is more about sales either than tech support. We have not tried phone calls yet because of time difference and there's no real need at all for our accounts. During our evaluation contacting to support, we find ipage staff more like to guide us to ticket system when referring to a technical question they can not answer, but no replies from ixwebhosting people and suddenly they send out answers after few minutes. I guess their guys were asking from seniors but forgot to notify people?
Actually there's really no need to contact their support for most of the time. Unless you need some changes on server end, most questions can be answered through their knowledge base and tutorials. Many online solutions are applicable for problem fixing with both service.
iPage vs Ixwebhosting for Price
iPage definitely provides better price than ix group. The newest promotion is offered at $1/mo for shared hosting and you have opportunity to sign up 2 years upfront. That means less than $50 for two years hosting service! No other website could offer such great price and server features. For those people who're operating a hobby blog or simple personal website, ipage is obviously perfect choice.
On the other hand, we need to pay $3.95 for starter plan, even after 25% discounts by coupon codes, the price still remains around $3/mo which is pretty high comparing to ipage hosting. Another problem is about the billing management. We signed up their unlimited pro plan for a year via promotional price. When we received renewal notice after 10 months, we tried to view how much we need to pay. But problem occurs, I just selected the "two years billing" option then it's auto charged from our paypal account. Actually I was not willing to pay yet.
Conclusion
iPage is better choice if you're going to launch website at a better price and upgrade opportunity. Ix is good if you want to utilize lots of dedicated IPs. But if you need more reliability for flexible hosting, ipage is absolutely better than ix. From our continuous monitoring and testing, uptime on ipage server is 5% more till present.
Go to ipage and view hosting plans http://www.ipage.com
