Honest InterServer WordPress Hosting Review

To be honest, while researching to prepare my notes and write InterServer review of their WordPress hosting service, I was left a bit surprised.

And my astonishment came from the fact that while the whole world, the hosting geeks and the WordPress enthusiasts are busy discussing other wordpress hosting services, There is one web host, working in the shadows, providing comparatively a lot better WordPress hosting for the last 2 decades and yet, still many are unaware of its name.

Apparently, it seems like we have an optimum web hosting service on our hands. A hosting service that is quick, reliable, secure, and yet, quite affordable.

If this is the case then why isn’t everyone talking about it? They have the best ratings and reviews, websites measuring server response and up time give InterServer a big, fat thumbs up. The service itself has won quite a few awards and other than a few complaints that we can expect from any WordPress hosting service, the users are quite happy with it as well.

So I decided to investigate further as it looked too good to be true and after some digging, I’m writing this review to help you guys decide and choose the best hosting service for your WordPress websites.

However, before jumping to the review, keeping in view the fair disclosure policy, please read this affiliate disclaimer:

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Interserver WordPress Hosting Review

History

Interserver was founded back in 1999 by two tech-savvy, high-school students, Mike Lavrik & John Quaglieri.

So they’ve been in the industry for the past 21 years (and counting…!)

Pricing Plans

Since we’ll restrict ourselves to just the WordPress hosting services, there are 2 kinds of hosting services that InterServer provides.

Shared hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting. Will discuss pricing of both plans here.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

1. Bloggers looking for WordPress solution in-a-budget
2. WordPress websites receiving low to mid-level traffic
3. Websites with targeted traffic mainly from North America and the UK. Even Europe is fine but the speed starts to dwindle as we start to move towards the East. One can easily tackle this issue with CDNs which InterServer does provide but that’s another topic.
4. Websites not consuming too heavy resources or seeking extensive support.

Who should not use WP Engine?

1. If you’re looking forward to building a resource-savvy website with high traffic then I would not recommend InterServer to you
2. Websites expecting their targeted traffic from Asia, Australia, or even Eastern Europe.
3. If you’re expecting to consult with the support staff extensively then InterServer, though providing 24/7 support, but still I would not recommend placing heavy bets on their support.

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.

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

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:

Mixed Reviews

Now, let’s see some reviews which are neither good nor bad. Although there’s definitely an element of criticism but still the users are not totally disappointed. I consider this kind of review a lot more closer to truth.

This user is generally happy but had some issues with the support.

Again, this user was appalled by the fact that he had to literally reiterate his issue multiple times. This issue somewhat resembles my case that I’ve explained above.

In short, overall, InterServer is quite good. It’s just that it needs to focus on its support quality. Although they claim that their support is award-winning but in my honest opinion, this does not seem to be the case.

What’s My Verdict? Do I Recommend InterServer?

As a web host service reviewer who has reviewed multiple web hosting companies, I would say that InterServer is definitely a web host service punching way above its weight.

Despite not well-known, and this is the reason why I was surprised when I was investigating about it.

What I’ve found is that InterServer provides one of the best bang-for-your-bucks in its class.

So it’s a big thumbs up for InterServer and definitely and strongly recommended. Just keep in mind the cons above and I’m quite hopeful that you won’t be disappointed.

Looking for InterServer Alternatives?

Before taking the leap of faith if you want to have a look at some of the InterServer’s alternatives then I appreciate your decision?

I would never suggest you blindly follow someone’s advice and take the plunge. If time is on your side then you should do some due diligence of your own as well.

Keeping that in view, I’m listing some InterServer alternatives that may interest you.

Alternatives Same As InterServer

1. A2 Hosting (highly recommended!)
2. Scala Hosting
3. Dreamhost
4. Blue Host
5. GoDaddy
6. HostGator
7. iPage
8. FatCow
9. InMotion Hosting

Comparatively More Premium InterServer Alternatives

The below alternatives are rather more expensive options if you can stomach their premium rates. Or if you’re looking forward to some serious WordPress blogging and hosting mission-critical websites and budget is not really an issue for you.

Let’s have a look at these alternative WordPress Hosting options:

1. Kinsta
2. CloudWays
3. WPX Hosting
4. Pressidium
5. FlyWheel
6. WP Engine
7. Media Temple
8. Liquid Web

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.