WordPress Hosting

Honest InterServer WordPress Hosting Review

InterServer.net WordPress Hosting

$5-$8/Month
8.8

Price

9.5/10

Server Response Time

9.0/10

Up-Time

9.5/10

Support

7.5/10

Security

8.5/10

What We Like

  • Fastest Web Host in a budget with great up-time
  • Free WordPress Migration and inter-insurance to detect and clean your website from any hacks and malware
  • Price-lock guarantee ensures that you pay the same price even after the first term
  • 50% server capacity guarantees that no more than 50% server's resources will be allocated thus ensuring great performance
  • Unlimited disk space, data, emails and FTP accounts

What We Don’t Like

  • Support is not up to the mark
  • No free domains on registering a new account
  • Weekly backups instead of daily for shared WordPress hosting

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Interserver WordPress Hosting Review

History

Pricing Plans

Shared Hosting – Pricing

InterServer offers relatively simple pricing plans especially for its Shared Hosting (a.k.a Standard Hosting) package.

All plans start with $5/month. However, they get even cheaper if you sign up for longer periods. The minimum being $4/month provided that you sign up for 3 years.

InterServer Shared WordPress Hosting Pricing

Managed WordPress Hosting – Pricing

Again, the pricing is simple. Absolutely no complex charts and comparison tables are required to perform an in-depth analysis of the InterServer prices against features.

The Managed WordPress Hosting plan starts from $8/month. You could end up paying $6.40/month provided that you sign up for 3 years.

InterServer - Managed WordPress Hosting - Pricing

InterServer WordPress Hosting Features

1. 99.96% Up Time

Although a little behind its competitor, BlueHost (99.99%), InterServer does have a good Up Time history (99.96%). A quick analysis from HostScore.net reveals that InterServer’s servers seldom go down.

2. Quick Server Response Time

InterServer can easily boast about their “bullet-speed” servers. Normally, their North American (US and Canada) servers respond in less than 100 milli seconds.

Even better, their East Coast servers take even less than 10 ms to respond to the user queries. Now that’s some serious speed we’re talking here.

Image Courtesy: HostScore.net

In a world where the website’s speed acts as a dominant factor in search engine rankings, I’m sure InterServer aces this requirement as their aggregate server response time is around 117.5 ms.

3. Price Lock Guarantee

Unlike other web hosting companies, which charge their customers higher when they renew their subscriptions, InterServer rewards you for loyalty.

With the Price Lock Guarantee, you can rest assure that you will be paying the same amount on your renewals that you paid the first time.

InterServer - Price-Lock Guarantee

However, there’s something I want to clarify as I also sought confirmation from their support staff to write about it here.

If you see the pricing section above you may notice that the longer period you sign up for lower you have to pay. That’s not surprising as many web hosting companies offer this pricing strategy.

However, what makes InterServer unique is that even on renewals, the price would remain the same. For e.g. you will have to pay $8/month if you resubscribe for one more year or $6.40/month if you resubscribe for 3 more years of InterServer’s Managed WordPress Hosting plan.

This is quite unique pricing feature in the web hosting space and so far, I’ve only seen InterServer offering this “bold” pricing model.

4. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

In order to provide an extra layer of assurance, InterServer offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. I believe this practice is becoming more of a norm which should be appreciated.

5. Free SSL Certificate

Since SSL certificates have now been made mandatory by Google, websites need them to ensure their visitors that they offer encrypted communication between the server and the clients. Fortunately, InterServer offers free SSL certificates to their Managed WordPress account holders.

6. 50% Server Capacity

The biggest downside of shared hosting is that the web host companies keep cramming up customers on one server until it is filled “up-to-the-brim”.

This is the main reason that sooner or later, you will find shared hosting users complaining about their websites getting slower.

Since the term, “shared” means that you will be sharing your resources with other websites as well, it’s quite obvious that your website performance will deteriorate over time.

InterServer, on the other hand, guarantees that they utilize only 50% of their server capacities. This means that you have more resources at your disposal even after say, ‘X’ number of months. So your website performance, instead of deteriorating, will remain consistent over the period of time.

7. Free Inter-Insurance

InterServer offers free clean-up of their compromised or hacked accounts. They will investigate the cause, eradicate the vulnerability, and restore your website without charging you even a dime for it.

InterServer - Inter Insurance

Even new customers who want to migrate their WordPress websites to InterServer can avail this feature.

8. Unlimited Storage Space, Data Transfer, FTP Accounts & Emails

That’s so many “unlimited” in one sentence. Right?

Well, all Managed WordPress Hosting subscribers get these unlimited features so that they can scale their websites easily.

9. 24/7 Support

I have tested their support and it’s quite rapid and available almost all the time (24/7).

This is another feature that can be attributed to InterServer.

However, one criticism that I want to make is that I did try their support for a rather non-technical issue (about the price-lock guarantee feature) and yes, they responded quickly but I just felt that their rep was not well-prepared.

Took a bit of time to respond to my subsequent questions and wasn’t even able to understand my simple query the first time so I had to rephrase my question multiple times.

I just want you to keep that in mind when signing up for InterServer. Other than that, the support, though not up to the mark, was relatively decent. Just don’t expect them to handle your highly technical issues like pros.

What are the Pros and Cons of InterServer?

Short on time? If yes, then let me summarize the advantages and the downsides of choosing InterServer as your WordPress hosting company.

Pros

  1. InterServer offers quick servers as I’ve already mentioned above. In fact, so fast that even a quite popular web hosting companies do not offer such speed.
  2. Free and White-Glove migration. This means that you can transfer your websites from your old hosts to InterServer and their experts will take care of the technicalities. Your involvement requirement is next to none
  3. Inter-Insurance: InterServer will clean and restore your accounts in case of a hack or other exploitation absolutely free of cost.
  4. Unlimited Resources: You get unlimited disk space, data, emails, and FTP accounts.
  5. InterServer is quite economical as the prices start from $5/month for shared and $8/month for Managed WordPress hosting. This can be further reduced if you sign up for longer periods.
  6. Price-Lock Guarantee ensures that you don’t have to worry about higher prices upon re-subscribing.
  7. Maximum 50% Server Capacity Utilization: InterServer guarantees that it will not utilize more than 50% capacity of its shared servers. Thus leaving behind more resources at the disposal of its shared users.
  8. 30-days money-back guarantee. Just in case you don’t find anything up to your expectations.
  9. 24/7 Support (chat, telephone, and email).
  10. 99.9% Uptime guarantee.
  11. LiteSpeed Caching and CloudFlare CDN to improve your website speed.

Cons

  1. Weekly backups instead of daily for shared WordPress hosting
  2. The quality of support can be much better
  3. Data Centers are only in the US
  4. No free domains on registering a new account

Who should and should not use InterServer?

Once we have all the features, pros and cons lined up, I think that it’s better to discuss that for whom WP Engine is the best-Managed WordPress hosting and who should go for relatively cheaper options. After all, not everything is meant for everyone.

Who should use InterServer?

Who should not use WP Engine?

User Reviews

Quite interestingly, the reviews and ratings left by InterServer’s users are using their service are quite stellar.

If you analyze TrustPilot, overwhemingly, 87% of its users have left positive reviews for InterServer and have left a rating of either 4 or higher (out of 5).

There are some unfavorable reviews as well but it’s good to see that InterServer followed up with them. Other than that, as I have mentioned above, majority of the users who left negative review were found complaining about its support.

4.6 Stars Ratings out of 5

Let’s have a look at these reviews:

Negative Reviews

From the select few awful feedback that I’ve chosen, you can see that the users are expressing their grudge against InterServer’s support

InterServer - Negative Review - Email Problem

This user had issues with his emails but according to the InterServer this is due to the suspicious IP. Nevertheless, a review worth considering.

The above is a rare but still an issue that the user had to face in the form of an outage. In my opinion, InterServer should have responded to this user and followed up with his issue

Positive Reviews

As compared to the negative reviews, there are simply heap of positive feedback for InterServer. Let me mention just a few of them:

InterServer - Positive User Review - 3
InterServer - Positive User Review - 2
InterServer - Positive User Review - 3

Mixed Reviews

InterServer - Mixed User Reviews - 1
InterServer - Mixed User Reviews - 2

What’s My Verdict? Do I Recommend InterServer?

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Final Thoughts

If the objective of InterServer is to serve the webmasters without creating too much fuss about it and staying well under the radar then it is doing a great job.

I’ve seen hosting companies offering mediocre services and yet there brands are plastered all over the internet.

Some say that InterServer does not have community managers so they don’t make the same noise as other brands otherwise a web hosting company with so many accolades, awards and healthy user ratings and reviews, deserves more recognition.

Though InterServer is not without its flaws (of course, no one is perfect), but overall, it’s definitely doing a great job. Especially when you keep the price in mind.

Before signing out, I’ll suggest that just in case you’re still perplexed, as I know that with so many options and technical jargon, a person does get overwhelmed, you can either leave a comment below or contact me.

Tell me your details and I’ll help you in figuring out just the right (WordPress) hosting for you.

Or go ahead and sign up for InterServer today. Just Click this link.