Editors iPowerWeb (iPower) Review

iPowerWeb Review

iPowerWeb is one of the largest shared hosting companies in the world, with more than 300 new customers signing up each and every day. They accomplish this with a very competitive price point and with the help of an aggressive affiliate program.


We reviewed iPowerWeb's Business Pro plan, offering 300 GB disk space, 3000 GB of monthly transfer, a free domain name and up to 500 POP e-mail accounts, all for only $7.95 per month.

Signup was relatively simple, although to take advantage of their low price you must purchase an annual plan (otherwise you are stuck paying an additional $30 setup fee). Our account was created approximately 10 hours after we signed up, at which point we were greeted with an email containing everything needed to get started.

iPowerWeb recently switched from the generic Cpanel control panel to something a little more elegant called "vDeck". The vDeck control panel is intuitive and thorough; everything is accessible through the expanded left-hand menu within two clicks.

An integrated file manager offers the ability to browse every file in your web directory, and upload up to ten files at once. Although not as feature-rich as offerings from Globat and Dreamhost, we did like the recycle bin feature, where you can retrieve files deleted up to a week prior.

Other features of the control panel include a WYSIWYG website editor which boasts a wide array of templates and E-commerce capabilities. Also on the plate is a set of "power plug-ins" including live chat, blogging via B2Evolution and a photo gallery. Setting up a MySQL database took seconds, and we were able to customize user permissions far more than with most other hosts.

We didn't like the company logo creation tool, as it didn't work, and the email account manager felt a little bit messy, but these are just minor gripes, overall the control panel is top-notch.

In doing this review we noticed many negative user comments and complaints directed towards iPowerWeb's hosting platform, specifically with regards to server speed and uptime / downtime. Although to date we haven't experienced any problems with our website, we did encounter an interesting problem with email, where we could not send email to Hotmail users from our website.

With an actual technical problem in hand we turned our sights to iPowerWeb's advertised 24/7 chat, toll-free and e-mail support department to give us clarity. Although their website help center is loaded with step-by-step setup instructions and documentation including videos, searching for "Hotmail email problems" got us nowhere fast.

Next we consulted iPowerWeb's email support. About 4 hours after sending our message we were greeted with a reply in the form of a question, which we quickly replied to. About 5 minutes after our reply we were greeted with an "automated reply" saying we had not replied. Whew.

It turns out that to carry on a conversation with iPowerWeb's support team you must reply by entering text between two special lines within the body of the email. Make a mistake and you must start over. In the end we were told (after another 2 hours) that there was in fact no problems at all. Time to call.

We waited on hold for no more than 4 minutes (2AM) however were quickly told that the problem would be escalated to a "senior support technician" and further communication would be handled via email. Funny enough after all of that we found the problem was mysteriously resolved the next day - one of those mysteries of Internet perhaps?

Overall, iPowerWeb's Business Pro hosting package is a good value considering it's very low price, the closest comparison being the packages offered by Globat and 1&1. The control panel is packed full of features that are both easy for the novice to grasp and adequate for advanced users as well.

Our only gripe was with the number hurdles we had to jump to get our technical support inquiry resolved. Technical support / customer care is a weak point with most hosting companies and iPowerWeb is no different.

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