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General Web Hosting Features: *Proprietary Virtual Control Panel *Frontpage 2002 Extensions *Miva Merchant *Postini Spam Filtering *PHP 4 *MySQL *POP3 Email Accounts *IMAP Email Accounts *SSH *SSL *PostSQL *MX Modifications *Shared Secure SSL Server *Site Builder Tool *24/7 Online Support *Python Support *Server Side Includes *Email Forwarding *Mailing List *Email Alias *Search Engine Submission *Autoresponders *Transfer Logs *Webalizer *Web-based Email *Password Protected Directories Premium Features: *Host Multiple Domains *Host Multiple Subdomains *Domain Parking *Domain Redirection *Dedicated IP Addresses *Java Servlets Network Information: *Utilizes AT&T Managed Services Web
Hosting Co. Street Location:
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Price & Cost Effectiveness:
Ipowerweb’s
pricing structure offers users a great value. For only $7.95 a month,
you receive a complete web-hosting package with 400-megabyte storage space
and 30 GB of web traffic. They do provide a number of good features, including
MySQL, PHP and FrontPage support. In general, they provide all the goodies
that are in the premium web hosting accounts - but at only $7.95 a month.
Overall, $7.95 is a good price to pay for this type of package. However,
we didn’t like the fact that the toll-free support isn’t provided
to the average user.
Reliability:
In comparison to the rest of the web hosting
companies, Ipowerweb’s servers seem to be above average. We had
several web hosting accounts with Ipowerweb, and generally their server
would always remain up. Throughout our year of testing their services,
their server has been down only for a few hours. This isn’t acceptable,
but it is great in comparison to the majority of web hosting companies
… that is except for the web hosting companies ranking higher.
Data Center:
Ipowerweb’s data center is located
in Santa Monica, California. A lot of their information is hidden, but
what is known is that they use SGI Origin 200 Servers. These are powerful
servers that Ipowerweb uses to provide to its users. They also have less
than one thousand users on each server; which is great because it ensures
stability and less vulnerability to hackers.
Customer
Service:
Ipowerweb’s customer service has improved within the past few months.
Whenever you called in the past, you would be put on hold for more over
minutes. They would then possibly direct you to an answering service if
you were on hold too long or if they were receiving other calls. With
recent improvements, now you can usually get a hold of someone within
five to ten minutes. Their phone number also becomes busy quite often
during certain times of the day. Furthermore, when you are a new user
with the system, they do not take orders over the phone. Instead, they
require that you place the order online. If you actually do manage to
get hold of the staff at Ipowerweb, their answers are normally sufficient.
However, not all customer support representatives seemed properly trained.
They claim to have 35 total employees within the company.
Control
Panel:
Ipowerweb is currently using CPanel 5. They state that they will be soon
releasing their own control panel called Dpanel; although CPanel is still
competent control panel software. It pretty much has all the features
that you need to manage your site, however, Hsphere’s control panel
still takes the lead. CPanel lacks a sufficient website editing program
and the control panel is missing several advanced features for users,
such as throttling for higher end users.
Overall:
In general, Ipowerweb is a competent web hosting company. Besides the
fact that at times it can be difficult to get a hold of anyone at Ipowerweb,
they have a high level of uptime and the most features of their hosting
package are on par with those of their competitors. Ipowerweb is worth
a shot if you are new to web hosting, because they offer consumers one
of the best values out there with the most user friendly tools.