IPOWER looks good on paper. They offer a starter plan with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name and 2,500 emails – not quite unlimited, but probably more than enough for most businesses. Other benefits include $100 in Facebook, Google and Yahoo advertising credits, a Yellowpages.com listing and the standard array of blogging and site building tools. This web hosting service runs all their servers run on wind power, so you can support the environment. The pricing is good, not especially cheap but definitely not overpriced, either. We are less impressed by the user interface and customer service. Occasional bug encounters may interrupt your workflow, and the support team is not responsive enough to compensate.

The live chat is a bit impersonal and less helpful than that of competitors. They lacked the knowledge to answer all of our questions quickly and accurately. All in all, they seemed more eager to have our business than to answer our questions.

Although the service is relatively easy to use, we encountered bugs. Most of them were too small to destroy functionality, but we had to find workarounds. After a while, you start to develop automatic avoidance strategies and the bugs no longer cause problems. The learning curve is therefore very steep and may be frustrating to beginners. The best web hosting services are much more polished – the glitches have long since been ironed out.

IPOWER offers decent security with SFTP file transfer. SFTP is another term for Secure Shell, and ensures that outbound data goes to the right place. This helps to protect your business from leaking data into nefarious hands. If you want to legitimize your site with an SSL certificate, however, expect to pay a hefty yearly fee.