IdeaHost has been in the market since 2015 and has made quite the impression amongst their competition as well as their customers. They quickly rose through the ranks to be one of the best web hosting companies out there. The reason is simple, Idea Host has a simple platform that is very user friendly at an affordable price.
The biggest drawback with Idea Host is the lack of upgrade options as well as the lack of hosting options. If you are running a blog or a small eCommerce website BlueHost will have no problem accommodating your needs. If you are running a large and complicated eCommerce business you may find yourself limited when trying to plan for future growth. Idea Host prides themselves in guaranteeing a 99.9% uptime which is pretty impressive. They have fast speeds and great customer reviews.
The price is by no means the cheapest on the market but the reliability makes up for that. They have a great reputation but being in business for only a couple of years, they still have a little time before they can truly build a valid reputation.
IdeaHost Plans and Pricing
IdeaHost have only three Shared Hosting plans. Which ranges from $2.99 to $4.99 as shown below. Each plan includes a Free domain, Free Email address and Unlimited bandwidth.
Also Read: Pressidium Hosting Review
Plan details are as shown in the picture. If you are choosing an annual plan, the price will be little higher. IdeaHost customers can make payment via credit card or PayPal.
Server Specifications & Uptime
IdeaHost doesn’t have an own server. They are partnered with CyrusOne Data centers Solution to meet up with their server requirements. The specification of their servers is as shown below.
- 32 Core AMD Opteron&tm; Processor 6376 or Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3
- 64GB / 32GB RAM
- 4 RAID 1S
- SSD MySQL
IdeaHost is powered by a community enterprise operating system called CentOS 6.8 Enterprise Linux x86. The connection speed on IdeaHost server is 100 Mbps (megabits per second). They, also have instant weekly backups of your content. The idea host data center is located in the USA in Houston, Texas.
IdeaHost Server Uptime
After hosting our test website with IdeaHost and using it for last 137 days, we have got an average uptime of 99.96%. We have affected by more than 10 down times and most of them are due to a maintenance shutdown. We have got a one month credit after a long downtime occurred in last March.
The average uptime we got this month was, 99.99% and it is 100% for the last one week. This web hosting company is keeping their word and providing a good uptime.
IdeaHost Load Time
IdeaHost servers are good enough to run a medium size website with a decent load speed. We have tested their speed from different test location using different speed testing tools including Pingdom and GT Metrix. You can see our Pingdom speed test below.
Our test website has very minimum data in it and it is a WordPress website which having a Page size of just 735KB. It took 1.86 seconds to load during our Pingdom speed test. A website with load time below 3 seconds is considered as an SEO friendly website and IdeHost did a good job of making our website very fast.
Customer Support: Did they Really Have One?
Within 137 days of usage, I have contacted them more than 10 times for different reasons. One thing I have found was, they have only one support guy available at a time.
Another biggest problem we have found was, IdeaHost and eHost don’t have a separate customer support center. They both are running from the same place and the same guy will be taking care of both eHost and IdeaHost customers.
One of the worst customer support we have experienced in the recent years. Most of the time they are copying and pasting the answers for our queries and customers will get irritated due to their attitude. We have enquired about their customer support centers and as they said, IdeaHost has a support center in India. If you are looking for a web hosting with a strong customer support to help you while you are in a problem, you are in a wrong place.
IdeaHost Pros and Cons
PROS:
- 3 different hosting plans
- Easy to use web hosting
- Free website builder tool
- 100% uptime guaranteed
CONS:
- Idea Host is new to the market
- They do not offer upgrades
- Price is competitive but a little high
- No automatic website backup
IdeaHost Review – Conclusion
Endurance International Group is running two web hosting companies with one server, one customer support, and same specification but different price and name. If you are buying a Hosting plan from IdeaHost, which will cost you Minimum $4.99/month for an Annual plan. A Hosting plan with the same features will cost only $2.99 if you are buying it from eHost.
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