iPage Review

iPage is one of the most well-known green hosts around, but being well-known and actually being good are two different things. Before you even think of using the iPage hosting, read my review and see if it’s really something you want, or a host you should avoid.

At the most basic level, iPage is an unlimited host (read my post on unlimited hosts) with a simple interface. They offer low-priced hosting, at less than $4 a month, and a website builder if you don’t know anything about HTML and CSS.

iPage also offers plugin management to install blog programs like WordPress and PixelPost. They also have FrontPage support, and scripting support for Perl, PHP and Server Side Includes (SSI).

And of course, the fit the green agenda, iPage runs on 100% wind energy, so unlike other hosts, this host is joining the green revolution.

All that’s great, but let’s see how it works.

The iPage website generator has a lot of good looking templates, and runs off of the Weebly website generator (a free host). Some are alright, but a lot are actually professional looking. However, if you have your own website CSS, it can take you a while to find out how to insert your own coding because there is no straight forward way of using your own coding.

To insert coding, go to “Templates,” “Blank Template” and begin typing in your code.

However, when I used the generator, either for a custom website or a template, I found the drag-and-drop interface to be clunky. If I wrote an article in Word and copy/paste it into the page, the paragraph spacing gets messed up and I have to go back and fix it.

You have to click the components several times before you can really work with them, and sometimes the toolbar gets in the way and you can’t see what you’re typing.

I also noted that in some instances (such as when building a table) with the HTML component, the spacing and padding looks fine from the preview window, but when you publish the page, the table (or any HTML element) will look different.

In my example, I built a simple table with blue and white alternating rows and a padding of 5. In preview this looked fine. When I clicked “Publish” and looked at the page, the padding was gone. Now I could understand there being a problem if I looked at the page in two different browsers, but this is not the case.

Overall the iPage host isn’t bad. It has a simplified website management tool that beginners will probably find easier. However, if you are used to the cPanel interface and know how to manage a website, this simplified interface will end up annoying you.

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