So 26AM Design Studio (my company) recently started working on a site for a client that hosts with iPowerWeb. iPowerweb is definitely not the worst web host i’ve been on. However it’s not the best web host i’ve been on either. First off, they have some wierd email problems. Emails do get through to their system, however any incoming mail still sends the sender a “recipient did not receive this email” message.

Secondly, their control panel interface is not super straight forward. I realize they just upgraded to their new VDeck, but it still doesn’t feel intuitive. Getting around the interface is a little clunky. It’d be nice to see some drop down menus so you can get to and from anywhere to anywhere in the interface in one click without having to click the back button to get back to another part of the site.

I haven’t seen them go down yet. So I guess uptime is good.

iPowerWeb.com does have a good feature set and most common scripts/apps work out of the box (ala. Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce.)
iPowerWeb Support SUCKS! I was on hold for 45 minutes and still did not reach an agent. I finally hung up and gave up. It’s not just me. I finally told my client to call them on his own. He had the same prob. I suspect we’ll migrate them to MediaTemple in the next month or so. We’ll see. I can’t believe I’m going to write this. But I’d probably choose 1AND1 over iPowerWeb.

In the world of cheap web hosting, it’s hard to say if I’d rather take good support + okay uptime over features and POOR support. I’d say settle for neither and pay a bit more for a better host (ala. MediaTemple, Pair Networks, SliceHost). However if you’re on a budget and have a low traffic website, find someone else. Just find some decent support.

Okay thats all for now.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.