iPowerweb Overview:

I've hosted my corporate site with iPower since 2005, and while there've been a few bumps along the way, I haven't stopped believing in their powers since. During that time they've grown from a small hosting company to one of the biggest and best hosts on the market, gaining a spot on Inc. Magazine's list of the 500 Fastest Growing Companies. IPower is now one of the biggest hosting companies out there with over 700,000 customers in over 100 countries (as of March 0f 2008). This explosive growth has made for a few hard lessons for them when it comes to being there for every one of their hundreds of thousands of customers. To their credit however, they've never failed to make it right. Since a period of growing pains that sometimes meant twenty-minute customer service hold times, they have stabilized into an exceptionably reliable, customer service-driven, value-oriented company.

IPower Value:

The IPower 'Business Pro" plan runs $7.95/mo. It comes with 50 Gigs of storage, 15000 Gigs of transfer bandwidth, 2500 email accounts, and unlimited addon domains. A number of nice features are also provided, including Java & content plugins, MySQL, Perl, PHP and FrontPage support. The $30 Google credit when you buy hosting, and the $50 Yahoo! Overture credit when you register a domain name are also great perks. Ipower has thankfully reduced their pricing and upped their hosting package offer to make it more competitive within the last year. Their plan is now within what I consider the "reasonable and generous" category.

IPower Service:

24/7 toll free phone, email, and live chat support. 45 minutes average support response by email, 12 minute average phone hold time, which ain't great. While phone and email are fine if you're in no big hurry, live chat is the support mode that I'm adddicted to, and this is where I feel iPowerweb has let me down the most. When I signed up I used to get a rep within a minute or two, but the last few times I've opened a chat window I've been greeted with a "you are 57th in line" (or thereabouts) message. Not cool. They really need to hire more support staff. Once I got someone on the line however, the rep was both knowledgeable and polite. If you can stand to keep the chat window open while you do something else then this won't be too much of an issue. But if you need help fast, this can be a huge problem.

IPower Reliability:

iPowerweb offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee from two Boston-area data facilities wih 24/7 security, video monitoring, and UPS and diesel generator backup. In the three years I've been with them I can say that I know of no time that they've gone down. Aside from uptime they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee which is comforting if you're hesitant to try a hosting company you're not yet familiar with.

visit iPowerWeb

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