iPowerWeb Web Hosting Review

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IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
216.69.226.51	HTTP		0.335 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
216.69.226.51	HTTP		0.271 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
216.69.226.51	HTTP		0.282 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm
216.69.226.51	HTTP		0.269 secs	05-13-2008 21:40:00pm

iPowerWeb.com Profile and Background

Ipowerweb is one of the largest web hosting companies in the industry that only started in 2001. It has its corporate headquarter located in Santa Monica, California. The business targets web hosting products and services towards the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) sector. According to its website, they service over 200 000 members across 150 countries.

The company employs over eighty employees and owns two data center facilities in Los Angeles, CA and Phoenix, Arizona. These data centers are strategically located on AT&T’s, Global Crossing and Cable & Wireless' OC48 / OC192 global IP backbones. In addition, they co-locate equipment in two other data centers managed by AT&T and Cable and Wireless.

From first impressions, the massive customer base and readily availability of Internet infrastructure makes it an ideal web hosting provider for businesses. Let’s see if they are really up to scratch.

Service Offerings

Ipowerweb has a fairly wide range of web hosting and other related service offerings including domain name registration, shared UNIX and Windows web hosting, and dedicated servers. The latter is probably the most impressive product offered by Ipowerweb where the costs of dedicated servers start from $49.95/month (with a $49.95 setup fee on a three month plan). The dedicated server comes with 500GB of monthly data transfer and a web hosting control panel as well.

But for the web hosting review, we purchased a shard web hosting plan called Business Pro.

Value for Money

The pricing structure of the Business Pro can be considered to be fantastic value. For $7.95/month, on a 12 month plan, you will receive 3GB of disk space, 50GB of monthly data transfer, 500 e-mail accounts, and the typical standard web hosting features. These specifications are about average in the industry but what makes it unique from the other web hosting companies is the selection of bonus packages. When you purchase the Business Pro plan, you have the choice of either receiving a free domain name and web design templates or marketing package. The marketing package consists of free banner advertisements, search engine position reports and $50 advertising credit at Overture. For business with little online presence, this can help jump start your company.

The control panel software adopted by Ipowerweb is called Vdeck, a very intuitive and user-friendly piece of software. It has all the bells and whistles required to administer your website through your Internet Browser. It also has an in-built web page builder/editor to make things easier for those business owners with little or no HTML experience.

Customer Support

IPowerweb offers customers support by two main methods: online help system and 24x7 toll number. However, with their toll free number, we were a little disappointed with the waiting times. On one occasion, we called up around 5:20pm EST and were put on hold for over 20 minutes before we simply hung up. We tried again the next morning, and got through after waiting for approximately 5 minutes. This gives us the impression that their support lines are fairly busy most of the time, and you will need some patience in some circumstances. We recommend you to use their online help center to send in support issues if you hate being on hold.

On a better note, its "Customer eService Center" is full of resources that can educate new businesses about how to best take advantage of their web hosting services. Ipowerweb includes interactive flash tutorials and a knowledgebase for customers to locate their queries.

Network Reliability and Performance

Over two months, we monitored our domain name and it resulted in approximately 25 minutes of downtime. This is certainly not a bad result out of two months examination period, and most web hosting customers wouldn’t even have of noticed it.

During the times when our test domain is online, we found their connection to be blazing fast, particularly, from locations in the Asian Pacific and EU region. If you are outside the US, Ipowerweb will certainly meet your expectations in terms of network performance and connectivity.

Final Words

In respect to features and value for money, IPowerweb is certainly up there, if not in front, of the other web hosting companies. However, their phone support is an area where they need to improve on. This is not difficult to comprehend considering they are a fast growing web hosting company. Nonetheless, they are good choice for small to medium size businesses.

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