Embedded Files
In this review blog post, I will do an InterServer review to test and research how good InterServer as a hosting company in terms of performance and resources before you finally decided to use InterServer or not. Okay, before we jump into my review. It's good to have an overview knowledge of the hosting company.
InterServer is a US hosting company which is founded in 1999 by two tech-savvy guys Mike Lavrik and John Quaglieri. The company head office is based in Secaucus, New Jersey. In the beginning, InterServer was just a web hosting reseller. Then it continued to grow. InterServer currently provides Web Hosting, Cloud VPS, Windows VPS, Dedicated Server, Colocation, Storage Server, and Email Hosting.
All the InterServer data centers are located in New Year, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. It means you will get the best site speed performance using InterServer hosting if most of your website visitors come from Western countries. The company itself has 21 years of experience in delivering hosting services to its customers with great results.
In terms of achievement, InterServer also won several awards such as WHSR 5 star hosting award, BBB A+ rating, Top Uptime Award by WebHostingTopList.com, Excellent Service recognized by Hostadvice, etc. InterServer also offers a very competitive price in the market in terms of pricing. You can get a great site speed performance and unlimited resources using InterServer at a good price.
InterServer Review Overall
InterServer Review Overall
Overall, I can say that InterServer is a great hosting company. If you want to know the overall analysis of my review for InterServer, you can read this section to get the general perspective.
The company's competitive advantages are the free unlimited resources on its starter plan and the fast site speed performance, which is around 1.83 seconds on average based on GTmetrix. The fastest will be 0.7 sec, while the slowest recording time will be 3.1 sec. Since the servers are located in the US, You will get the best site speed performance if your website visitors are mostly from the US and Europe. Even though InterServer is not the fastest hosting company, but the speed tolerance is still acceptable to be considered great. You can get even better site speed performance from InterServer by a little bit of optimizing and tweaking on your site.
In terms of Uptime performance, InterServer couldn't guarantee uptime performance above 99.99% all the time especially if you used their shared hosting plan. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) for InterServer's uptime quite unstable. Sometimes it can reach below 99.99%. Despite the unstable uptime performance, InterServer keeps monitoring and maintaining their uptime performance to satisfy their customer
In terms of customer support, the company has fast response customers support through live chat, email, and phone 24/7. The in-house customer support can help to answer and solve any technical issue you have. If you want to search for the information by yourself. The knowledge base section will give you complete information for what you're looking for if you need more guidelines.
InterServer offers an affordable price for their hosting plan with a price-lock guarantee, which makes them different from competitors. You will find many hosting companies will charge you even four times for the renewal. But, it's different with InterServer. The price that you enroll in will remain the same.
Besides offering an affordable price, InterServer's basic hosting plan also gives you unlimited SSD storage, unlimited data transfers, and unlimited custom email domain. You won't have to worry anymore about saving so many pictures, videos, or files. In contrast, other hosting companies don't offer an unlimited SSD storage package. It means you will have limitations in saving your images, videos, and files which can impact your site speed performance.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you decided to sign up for the InterServer web hosting plan through my special link, I have a SPECIAL GIFT for you. I will send you for FREE my two premium ebook written by me to your email. You can check out the ebook bonus on the special deal section in the last part of this blog post.
InterServer currently provides nine hosting types: shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, colocation, reseller hosting, quick servers hosting, and custom hosting. Let's break down each of them.
Shared Hosting
Shared Hosting
This will become a very basic hosting plan for anyone who just started their site, shared hosting plan will be suitable for low to medium traffic. InterServer standard hosting plan offers a super competitive price. You can get one year plan for only $30 and renew at $83 for the next year. This is super cheap compare with other hosting companies' shared hosting plans. I would not recommend you to enroll for one month only, which is only $2.5 for your first month, then on the next month, your renewal cost will increase to $7 per month.
Many people are misleading the InterServer standard hosting price, which is shown as $2.5/ month on the InterServer home page. The fact the $2.5/ month only valid for one month. In the next month, you will need to pay $7/ month.
The shared hosting (standard) plan has three options that you can choose from standard hosting, ASP.net, and boost web hosting.
-Standard hosting: This plan is all you need if you just started building a blog or online store. If you have a website with low to medium traffic visitors. This plan will be your best option.
-ASP.NET (Windows): This is the same as standard hosting but is dedicated to Windows servers. If you use Windows programs to run your business, then Windows hosting will be the best option.
-Boost web hosting: This is the enhanced version of the standard hosting to boost the performance of your website.
VPS Hosting
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is a great hosting option for you if you want to scale up your hosting performance. This hosting option will be suitable for you when you want to have dedicated resources with wider capacity. You can use this plan if you have mid to high-traffic visitors to your site. Moving to VPS hosting can improve your site performance and also better ranking for Google SEO due to your site speed increase.
InterServer provides a different type of VPS hosting such as Cloud, Windows, WordPress, Webuzo, and Storage. You will need to choose which type of VPS will be suite your needs.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is a plan to have a separate dedicated physical server for your business, allowing you to have more flexibility to fulfill your needs in terms of performance and security. You maybe wondering when you will need dedicated server hosting? You will need to move your hosting to a dedicated server when you have huge website visitors and want to enhance your site security to accommodate the increase in traffic without sacrificing your load page time.
All the InterServer's dedicated hosting plan comes with free setup, 1Gb or 1000 Mb port, provisioning in four hours, security protection with DDoS, 1000 Gb transfer, managed support, and free data migration. The dedicated hosting plan is like a VPS plan with more resources in terms of power, performance, flexibility, and functionality.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting can be a great option for you to scale up your business. You will not use a single server to host your site but use multiple servers to scale up your resources. Cloud hosting can be a great option if you want to have perfect uptime and grow your site speed without having any delay. Website visitors with medium to high traffic volume can be suitable to use cloud hosting. You can actually use dedicated and VPS servers when you have a high traffic volume to your site, but the downside is that both don't have the scalability option that clouds are offering.
Normally, we see other big companies or businesses or blogs with huge traffic volumes will prefer to use cloud hosting to host their site. It can provide seamless site speed and uptime performance for your site visitors. InterServer Cloud VPS offers five different types of cloud such as VPS home, Windows VPS, WordPress VPS, Webuzo VPS, and storage. The great thing is all of them offer very good competitive prices for their cloud hosting plan.
Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting
Reseller hosting is an option for you if you want to sell hosting services to other businesses or bloggers. InterServer provides you with five different reseller hosting packages. The main differences between the hosting package are the disk space and the bandwidth. When you just started, all you need is the lowest package which is RS One. The reseller package will depend on your business growth.
InterServer reseller hosting also provides white labeling on their cPanel so you can brand your hosting business with your own logo. You don't have to worry since your clients can't find any InterServer attribute on their cPanel. In terms of features, all the data of your clients will be automatically back up by InterServer. You can easily manage all your client's accounts through your web host manager.
Colocation
Colocation
This is the plan you need when you want to have flexibility, performance, and power of a dedicated server while also having control of the physical infrastructure. You will get access 24/7 to InterServer New Jersey datacenters. The Colocation plan has 24/7 fast customer support to help you set up everything or whenever you're having an issue. Not only that, the colocation was back up with UPS and generator back up to provide the best service for their customer.
Pro Of Using InterServer
Pro Of Using InterServer
Let's see what the pro of using InterServer as web hosting for your business are.
1. Unlimited SSD Storage
Interserver provides unlimited SSD storage (unlimited disk space), which means you don't need to worry anymore about storing any files like pictures, videos, or files that can slow down your site due to disk capacity. This is a great offer that not all hosting companies will give unlimited disk space even on their starter plan. Usually, the hosting company only offers 5GB SSD storage only.
2. Fast Speed Hosting Company
You can't ignore site speed. This is really crucial for the user experience of your website visitors. You can't afford to have a high bounce rate on your website due to the very slow load page time when visitors come to your site. If you have fast load page time on your site, it can help to increase your SEO rank on SERP, Google count site speed as one of the ranking factor.
I can't stress this enough, one of the important factors that determine your site speed is the hosting provider you use. Hence, choosing the right hosting company that can provide high site speed is crucial, either making or breaking it. The good news is InterServer claims itself to have great site speed performance by using SSD caching servers to optimize it. The company is truly aware of keeping its site speed performance above expectation to satisfy its customers. On average Interserver's site speed is around 639ms for the past 12 months based on stats.pingdom, which is really good results.
The research shown that slower site speed can affect the conversion rate of your website. So, you don't have to worry anymore if you choose InterServer as your self-hosted site in terms of site speed.
3. Great Customer Support
Fast response customer support is the key to satisfy the customer. This is one of the great things that Interserver's customer support have to serve their customer. Whenever we need some help from their customer support, you can get a prompt response from the support team through live chat. Currently, the company provides chat, email, phone, and knowledge base to support their customer. One of the most important metrics when we want to measure how good the company's customer support is based on their response rate. Luckily, Interserver can provide fast response support within less than 1 minute on average.
The company also has in-house customer support to give exclusive support. It's important to have in-house support which well trained. So, the company can help and support at their best performance instead of outsourcing online customer support. You will not be facing any issues anymore when requesting any help, such as migrating your site.
4. Free Site Migration
Not all people will start their website from scratch when moving to a new hosting provider, if you're currently using another hosting provider and plan to move to InterServer. Their support team will help you to migrate your site for free with very minimal downtime. No need to worry about technical stuff. This is one of the great services that hosting company offers to their customer. They will be very happy to help you migrate to their hosting service. Meanwhile, another hosting company will charge you a small fee for the migration.
5. Free SSL Certificate
The SSL certificate will be needed to build trust and credibility in your website. It also helps to boost your SEO ranking on Google SERP. A website without an SSL certificate will be marked as unsecured, which means all the website visitors' confidential information will be protected, such as credit card information. Luckily, you will be given the SSL certificate for free to all InterServer's plans. So, you don't need to buy an SSL certificate separately.
6. Unlimited Custom Email Domain
This is one of the great benefits that InterServer provides to their customer. You can have an unlimited custom email domain to have branded email account. Using branded email account have several benefits, such as build trust with your customer if you run an eCommerce store. If you're a blogger, having a custom email domain can help you get approval faster when applying for an affiliate network.
Since you get the custom email domain for free, you don't need to buy the custom email domain separately from Google workspace.
7. Intershield Protection
Hosting protection really important to secure our site from any hacker attack. InterServer provides free Intershield protection to detect an attack and stop it before it starts. The way Intershield protection work is by checking the IP address of the malware or bad activity, then it will be filtered and scanned. If the malware is detected, it will be under review and block. Otherwise, pass it. Besides Intershield protection, there is another further protection. The cPanel for each accounts also isolated each other. No account can see any information about another account.
8. CPanel with Softaculous Installer
The cPanel was equipped with a Softaculous installer, which can make it easier to install the popular web application. Using Softaculous can fasten the installation process. It's like a shortcut for you to bypass all 419 scripts at once.
9. Free Sitepad Website Builder
This is a bonus feature for you if you haven't built your website. You can use the free Sitepad website builder to build your landing page or catalog page. The website builder is free for all InterServer's plan. You can customize your site by drag and drop. The website builder usually a more friendly beginner to someone who never built a website (complete beginner). It's easier to use whenever you need any help. The support team will help and guide you.
10. Free Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare CDN will help to increase your site speed by providing the closest geographical nodes to maximize the load page time. You will get free Cloudflare CDN on the basic package, which can help to improve your site speed. Besides, Cloudflare CDN also provides security protection against DDoS attacks.
11. Free Weekly BackUp
You don't have to worry anymore about losing your data due to malfunction or being attacked by a hacker. InterServer will backup your data for free every week. This feature will save your time and energy whenever an unexpected thing happens. Securing your data become really important. Luckily InterServer starter plan has covered this one to be included in the package.
12. 21 Years of Experience
InterServer has 21 years of experience in the hosting industry. The company has legit experience and knowledge that make them a competent company to provide hosting service. The company actively innovates to launch new products and services to serve customer needs. Due to their consistency in performance, the company can scale up its business to serve 500 Fortune companies, both domestic and international.
13. Price Lock Guarantee
InterServer has a price lock guarantee on its hosting plan. It means the price to register for the standard hosting plan will remain the same for the life span of your account.
Cons Of Using InterServer
Cons Of Using InterServer
Despite all the pro side, there is some downside also using InterServer as your web hosting. Here are the cons:
1. Not Stable Uptime Performance
Having stable uptime performance really important to keep our website live on the internet. It's also crucial for the user experience when the website visitors come to our site. You don't want your website visitors to come to your site, but they couldn't because your site is getting downtime. Unfortunately, in terms of uptime performance, I see an unstable performance on InterServer hence the average uptime performance is 99.87% for the past 12 months, as you can see from the stats.pingdom history report. The uptime performance looks fluctuating, with the lowest will be 99.52%.
2. Data Center Focus On US
Not many people know that the data center's location will determine how your site speed is performing. If the hosting company has a data center across the world, you will be fine no matter where the website visitors come from, whether from western or eastern countries. The site speed will be good.
Kindly note that all InterServer data centers are located in the US (Secaucus, NJ, and Los Angeles). So, if your website visitors are mainly coming from western countries, you will be fine using InterServer. But, if your website visitors are mainly coming from Asia and Australia, then you will need to re-consider using InterServer.
3. No One Year Free Domain
InterServer doesn't give you a free one-year domain, so you will need to buy the domain package separately. InterServer offers you a super affordable domain registration package, which is only $7.99 per year for .com domain. This price considers super cheap compare to if you buy a domain from other providers like Go Daddy or Namecheap, which will charge you around $15-$20.
4. Misleading Hosting Price
If you take a look at the hosting price on the homepage of InterServer, you will see the hosting price, which is $2.5/ month. Unfortunately, it's only applicable for one month, which means when you renew it for the next month, the price will increase to $7 per month. This is a huge increase and misleading a lot of people who want to try the InterServer hosting service.
Here the actual price package offers by InterServer
-$2.5 for one month, renew at $7 for one month
-$15 for six months, renew at $42 for six months
-$30 for twelve months, renew at $84 for one year
I recommended you take a one-year package to get the cheapest package if you're sure and ready to host your site with InterServer.
5. The VPS Hosting Not for Beginner
InterServer's VPS plan doesn't have cPanel and Softaculous, which can make the setup easier. Hence, it can be overwhelming for someone unfamiliar with the technical part (beginner) to switch to VPS. When you want to upgrade your hosting to a VPS plan, you will need to learn a little bit, or you can ask the support team to help you if you're facing any issues.
InterServer Feature
InterServer Feature
Let's summarize all the feature that InterServer provide to their starter plan in general:
-Unlimited ULTRA SSD Storage
-Intershield protection
-SitePad website builder
-Softaculous one-click installation
-Global Content Caching
-LiteSpeed Caching and Cloudflare CDN
-Free Weekly backup data
Those all the basic features that you will get when you sign up for their shared hosting basic plan.
InterServer Alternative
InterServer Alternative
You may want to compare how good InterServer with other hosting companies. No perfect hosting company so there will be an advantage and disadvantages for each company. Let's see the comparison with other hosting providers.
InterServer vs Bluehost
InterServer offers more resources and features on their starter plan compare to Bluehost. Even though Bluehost offers a cheaper starter plan in terms of pricing, the renewal cost will be four times even more expensive. While the renewal cost for the InterServer will be much cheaper compared to Bluehost.
In terms of site speed, Bluehost site speed considers slower compare to InterServer site speed. Meanwhile, in terms of uptime performance, both of them have the same performance. You can earn more free resources by using the InterServer basic shared hosting plan. You will get unlimited SSD storage, faster site speed, unlimited email domain, free weekly data backup, and unlimited data transfer, which you can't get from Bluehost's shared hosting basic plan. If you prefer to have more free resources and faster site speed, InterServer will be your choice over Bluehost.
InterServer vs HostGator
When comparing the basic shared hosting plan, InterServer provides more value compared to HostGator. Even though HostGator's basic hosting plan is cheaper than InterServer, the hosting quality is not as good as InterServer, which can provide faster site speed and fast response customer support. While the customer support on HostGator quite slow to respond to any queries.
You will get more free resources from InterServer's basic plans, such as unlimited SSD storage, unlimited email domain, free weekly data backup, unlimited data transfer, InterShield protection, and faster site speed. There so many benefits you can earn with the hosting price slightly different. If you need more unlimited resources, fast response customer support, and good site speed, InterServer will be your choice over HostGator.
If you're on a tight budget to start, then HostGator can be your option by considering the limitation on resources that the HostGator can give you on their basic plan.
InterServer vs HostPapa
Both InterServer and HostPapa, doing a great job in terms of site speed performance and customer support. Both of them could satisfy their customers in those aspects. The only difference is the uptime performance. HostPapa can guarantee uptime performance above 99.99%, while InterServer couldn't achieve it.
In terms of free resources you will get on the basic plan, InterServer still a winner by providing unlimited SSD storage, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email domain, and free weekly data backup. If you're looking for a cheaper hosting plan with more free resources but unstable uptime performance, then InterServer will be your choice over HostPapa.
If you're looking for more stable uptime performance above 99.99% with good site speed but a higher hosting price per month, HostPapa will be your best choice.
InterServer vs KnownHost
Both of them are US hosting companies. These two hosting companies focus on delivering great service quality to their customer by providing good site speed, free backup data, fast response customer support 24/7, and strong security protection. InterServer offers unlimited SSD storage, unlimited data transfer, and unlimited email domain, while KnownHowt offers unlimited bandwidth. In terms of uptime performance, KnownHost will be the winner by guarantee uptime performance above 99.99%, while InterServer couldn't guarantee it.
Comparing the hosting basic price plan, InterServer offers cheaper with more resources compare to KnownHost. If you want to get more unlimited resources and lower hosting prices, InterServer will be your choice over KnownHost. The only downside is the unstable uptime performance.
If you choose stable uptime performance, good site speed, and unlimited bandwidth with a higher price for the basic plan, then KnownHost will be your choice over InterServer.
InterServer vs HostUpon
HostUpon can be considered a win in every aspect over InterServer. HostUpon can provide guaranteed uptime performance above 99.99% with good site speed performance while offering its basic hosting plan super affordable, which is only $2.95/month. HostUpon also offers a free one-year domain while InterServer not. The only downside of using HostUpon as a hosting company is that there is no free SSL certificate, while InterServer gives it to you for free.
InterServer provides more useful resources such as unlimited SSD storage, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email domain, and free weekly data backup. You can't find all those free resources on the HostUpon basic hosting plan. So, if you only care about uptime performance, site speed, and cheaper hosting plans, HostUpon will be your choice over InterServer. Kindly keep in mind that you need to buy an SSL certificate separately
InterServer Final Verdict
InterServer Final Verdict
In a nutshell, InterServer is a great US hosting company that offers a wide range of hosting. The company provides several benefits to their customers, such as unlimited disk storage, unlimited data transfer, free weekly backup, free Sitepad website builder, free Cloudflare CDN, free SSL certificate, and Intershield protection. InterServer has SSD caching servers to optimize its site speed, which make their site speed great compare to other competitors. You don't have to worry anymore about the site speed performance, as long as most of your website visitors come from the US and Europe since InterServer's data centers are located in the US.
The great customer support will be ready 24/7 to help you if you have any issues. In terms of pricing, InterServer offers a super competitive pricing plan with a price-lock guarantee. The only downside is the unstable uptime performance which sometimes below 99.99%, and no free one-year domain.
If you want to scale up your hosting to a VPS plan, you will need to hire someone to do the setup for you, especially if you're not an expert in technical stuff because the VPS plan doesn't have cPanel and Softaculuous. It will be overwhelmed for you to set up by yourself.
Overall, InterServer is a legit hosting company with 22 years of experience and expertise. The company is growing by providing a wider range of hosting services for their customer. So, yes, I would recommend you to use them to host your site.
P.S: Special FREE Gifts for Ebiz Review Reader
P.S: Special FREE Gifts for Ebiz Review Reader
I would like to say thank you for reading to the end. I have special gifts for you if you decided to take InterServer hosting through my special link or decided to use any other hosting company through my recommendation link within this website. As a gift, I will send you my two premium ebook written by me for signing up the hosting company through my link.
I am confident that the two ebooks that I will give you will be useful since it's based on my own experience and knowledge running blog and eCommerce store. Let me explain the details of the bonus, kindly note that I personally sell these two ebooks on Gumroad from my personal blog Ebiz Strategic, but you will get these two premium ebooks at no cost if you decided to sign up the hosting companies through my link.
IMPORTANT NOTE: you also eligible to get the free bonuses below if you decided to take other hosting providers, whether HostPapa, Hostgator, Bluehost, KnownHost, or HostUpon through my link, all of them is a good hosting provider that I have tested myself also. You just need to choose the hosting company that can suit your need. Don't forget to email me at juherianto@ebizstrategic.com with the receipt and your domain name to my email. After I have validated it, then I will send you the free bonuses below.
FREE BONUS 1: Ebook The Best Compilation FREE Traffic Method ($39 Value) – 123 Pages
This ebook will give you the best free traffic strategies guidance step by step, tips, and tricks. I use the free traffic strategies inside the ebook to drive traffic to my blog and earn affiliate sales without paying any advertising. The ebook will cut your hassle and overwhelmed in learning free traffic strategies on the internet. You don't have to waste your time and energy finding the best strategies that will work on the market. I have compiled the free traffic strategies that work inside the ebook. So, you can get a lot of benefits to grow your blog traffic organically.
The ebook will cover all the free traffic methods such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, Youtube, Slideshare, Medium, Google Sites, Forum, and Blog commenting. You can take a look at the sneak peek of the ebook from the Gumroad product page, where I share the table content of the ebook. You will find this ebook is unique. It's specific focuses on the strategy session for each channel. So, it can be your one-stop solution for free traffic methods. I am pretty sure you will find this helpful ebook whether you're a beginner or intermediate blogger or affiliate marketer. GRAB this ebook for FREE!
FREE BONUS 2: FREE Untapped Method Shopify Dropshipping POD Collaboration with Artist ($29 Value) – 98 Pages
You maybe thinking that dropshipping is dead. The fact, it's not dead! Dropshipping is just a business model. Maybe you have been suffering from losing money when running dropshipping stores due to expensive Facebook ads and Google ads. Well, this ebook will be your solution to prove that dropshipping can still be profitable. If you're struggling to be profitable when run a paid advertising campaign for your Shopify dropshipping store. I will share my personal free untapped method with you that made me over $3500+ within two months by collaborating with an artist (zero ad spend). I am pretty sure that you will never hear about this method before.
Don't worry. This method is not only limited to Shopify as an eCommerce platform, but you can also use other eCommerce platforms to implement the strategy, such as Magento, Woocommerce, Wix, etc. The idea here is to use the free traffic method to drive organic sales.
In the ebook, I will share my personal strategy step by step how I design my store, entice the artist to collaborate with me, and promote the Print On Demand (POD) merch for free. You can sell any Print On Demand product without having any skill design since the artist will provide the design to you for free. The ebook also shares my personal case study and lesson learned while implementing this strategy so you can avoid the same mistake I did and achieve better results than me. Curious how I can earn those organic sales fast? Grab this ebook for FREE!!
After you have signed up InterServer through my link, don't forget to email me at juherianto@ebizstrategic.com with the screenshot of your receipt and domain name. After I have validated it, I will send you these two premium ebooks as a gift for you.
Well, that's all for today's blog post about the KnownHost review. I hope you can decide whether you will sign up for it or not. Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!.
Enjoy this blog post? Bookmark and share it on social media 😊
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse