IX Webhosting Review
| Category | Score |
|---|---|
| Core Features | 10/10 |
| Email Features | 10/10 |
| Support & Security Features | 10/10 |
| Website Statistics | 9/10 |
| Administration & Software | 10/10 |
| Multimedia Support | 10/10 |
| Included Scripts | 9/10 |
| E-Commerce | 8/10 |
| Overall Score | 76/80 |
| Rank | #2 |
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Pros: Unlimited domains, subdomains, parked domains, storage space, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, forwards and autoresponders; 24/7/365 live phone or chat support; 30 day money back guarantee; Comprehensive free script library and software support; $75 Google Adwords advertising credit; $25 Yahoo! Advertising Credit; 15 Dedicated IP addresses; 3 free domain names.
Cons: No Private SSL Certificate included, No Moodle or Drupal support, No AWStats.
Overview: IX Webhosting has the most advertising credits of any host on our list. They provide excellent 24/7 phone & chat support and have a responsive support ticket team with a turn-around time of about 4 hours. Inclusion of 15 dedicated IP addresses means that you can have 15 independent websites each with their own shopping carts. However, you will have purchase an SSL certificate separately because it’s not included. If you need a budget-friendly host with a respectable feature set, IX Webhosting is a great choice.
IX Webhosting has the best Windows hosting plans available, with support for ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Access, MSSQL as well as the traditional scripting languages. Their VPS hosting is also excellent. It comes in 3 levels, each allowing you to choose between Linux VPS hosting and Windows VPS hosting.
IXWebhosting Review – Core Features: 10/10
IX Webhosting offers a strong set of core features to make your hosting account flexible enough to handle most types of websites “right out of the box”. You get unlimited storage space, bandwidth, domains, sub-domains, parked domains, FTP accounts and MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. There is a 10 gigabyte total size limit on your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, which is very large and should accommodate most small to medium business websites, blogs and personal sites. They also support international domain names. Anonymous FTP is supported, along with .htaccess editing (to manage access to your pages and folders) and custom error pages (so you can keep visitors on your site even when a page doesn’t load).
IX Webhosting provides 15 free dedicated IP addresses, which are essential if you plan to have your own payment processor and shopping cart. The great part about having 15 of them is that you can set up 15 separate sites, each with individual carts. These do require an SSL certificate, which ensures your customer’s personal data is secure. Many hosts offer free shared certificates, but at checkout, their name will show in the address bar. That can be off-putting for customers. With a private SSL certificate, your domain is what appears to customers in the address bar, which shows them you are a real professional business and not some shady here-today-gone-tomorrow operation. IX webhosting provides a shared SSL certificate as part of your account, but if you need a private SSL certificate, you will have to purchase it separately.
With your IX Webhosting account, you also receive 3 free domain names. As long as you stay with IX, your domains will remain free and you will not have to pay to renew them every year. They also include server and domain aliases as part of your account. IX Webhosting does not provide SSH shell access. However, since most file transfer you will do is via FTP, this should not present any issues. As far as hosting account and site administration are concerned, they can be done through the integrated control panel in your account.
IXWebhosting Review – Email Features: 10/10
The email features included in all of the hosts we reviewed are essentially the same. IX Webhosting provides unlimited POP3/IMAP email accounts, unlimited autoresponders and unlimited mail forwarding/aliases. One very important feature to note is that each separate domain in your account can have its own email addresses. You also have control over catch-all emails. SPAM filtering is also included, which gives you custom filtering and black/white lists. Webmail is included and is compatible with personal email programs (Outlook, etc.). Your total mailbox quota is 10 gigabytes.
IX Webhosting allows mailing lists and provides EZMLM Mailing List Manager. The limit on the number of mailing lists you can have is equal to the number of email accounts on your plan. Since they provide unlimited email accounts, you can have unlimited mailing lists. The IX Webhosting email policy states that if you have a mail list or a script that is sending more than 300 messages a day there is a possibility you may need to be white listed on their mail servers.
This is done by IX Webhosting administration staff only through our 24/7 Help Desk. If you feel this needs to be completed please open a support ticket providing the following information and the administrators will take your request into consideration: How many messages will you be sending per hour/day/week? Describe your policy regarding the treatment of bounced messages. What application is being used to send your messages? Which email address will be shown as the return-path in list messages (the address where bounces are collected)?
IXWebhosting Review – Support & Security Features: 10/10
IX Webhosting has first-class support and security. There is no setup charge for new accounts and a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with their services for any reason. They have a web hosting user manual, good FAQ and a generous selection of video tutorials to help you manage your websites and your account features. When you need to talk to a real person, they provide 24/7 live telephone and chat support. Their support ticket system is also available 24/7 and most tickets get a response the same day. Their support is outsourced, but it does not affect the quality of service. Their call center is located in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, so you will be able to discuss your issue with English-speaking personnel and not have to worry about misunderstandings or having someone just read back scripted answers to your technical questions.
IX Webhosting uses their own datacenters that feature modern security and redundant power, safety, and cooling systems. They also have a server load balancing system to spread work between servers for optimal resource utilization and maximum uptime. IX Webhosting is backbone connected, monitors their equipment 24/7 and stands behind their hosting abilities with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
In addition to automatic periodic server backups and free restoration from backup should your site or server be compromised, IX also provides hotlink protection (to prevent others from displaying your content on their sites using your bandwidth to do it), and password protected directories.
IXWebhosting Review – Website Statistics: 9/10
IX Webhosting provides raw access logs, error logs, referrer logs, bandwidth usage monitoring and sub-domain statistics. They also include Webalizer and Modlogan programs within your control panel to see a graphical representation of your traffic data. They do not include AWStats.
IXWebhosting Review – Administration & Software Support: 10/10
IX Webhosting runs a custom version of the H-Sphere control panel for account administration. H-Sphere is easy to use and provides all of the control you would expect in a hosting control panel. If you are planning on changing from cPanel to H-Sphere, you shouldn’t notice that much of a difference between the two. They are organized differently and cPanel is slightly easier to use, but the differences should be negligible. Some reviewers believe that H-Sphere offers more control but comes with a steeper learning curve than cPanel. If you are looking to host your first site, your learning curve will be the same either way.
As far as control is concerned, it depends on how your host has configured their control panel system. If they don’t tweak it too much, the level of control is about the same for shared hosting accounts. IX Webhosting’s version of H-Sphere is customized, but it gives you basically the same options as cPanel, they are just organized differently. You can still manage your email, domains, databases, scripts, FTP and file uploads without any extra work. IX also has a demo of H-Sphere on their site that you can try out before you decide.
IX Webhosting supports the latest versions of all the current web application software, including PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. Each account has CGI-BIN and SSI capability as well as support for JavaScript and DHTML. IX Webhosting allows custom PHP.ini files and has phpMyAdmin for MySQL database management and phpPgAdmin for PostgreSQL database management. They have Microsoft FrontPage extensions available and allow uploading sites from Dreamweaver. They are also WordPress ready.
IXWebhosting Review – Multimedia Support: 10/10
IX Webhosting supports streaming audio and video along with Real Audio, Real Video, MIDI, Flash, Shockwave and custom MIME types. Combine this with their unlimited bandwidth feature and you have a great place to host videos, podcasts, webinars and other streaming video and flash content.
IXWebhosting Review – Included Scripts: 8/10
IX Webhosting includes a decent array of scripts that can be installed with a single click. These include forums & message boards, form-mail scripts, image galleries, blogs, site builders, content management systems & portals, project management, polls & surveys, FAQs, customer support & ticket generation, shopping cart & e-commerce scripts, chat, a mailing list script, search and a CGI script library. These include popular applications such as WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Xoops, PHPbb, XMB Forum, osCommerce, Coppermine Photo Gallery, PHProjekt, DokuWiki, PHPAdsNew, phpCOIN, OpenX, phpESP, WebCalendar and more. They do get a few points off their overall score in this category because they do not include Drupal, Moodle, Noah�s Classifieds, dotProject, PHPauction and a few others typically included with Fantastico’s standard script library that you would get on a cPanel host.
IXWebhosting Review – E-Commerce Features: 8/10
IX Webhosting provides a good set of e-commerce features. The 15 dedicated IP addresses that come with the Unlimited Pro plan give you the freedom to have 15 distinct stores and can reduce the need to migrate to a VPS or dedicated server plan when you have that many sites. The only drawback is that for each site, you will have to purchase a private SSL certificate separately because they do not come with the plan. The plan does include a shared SSL certificate. If you have your own web store and your own merchant account (as opposed to accepting payments through PayPal or Clickbank where they process the transaction and therefore handle the security), a private SSL certificate is the professional choice.
IX does provide free web templates to get you going quickly if you’re not a web designer. Popular shopping carts are in the script library and include osCommerce, Cube Cart and Zen Cart. IX Webhosting has the highest advertising credit of any host reviewed. They give you a $75 Google Adwords credit, a $25 Yahoo! Advertising credit and a $50 MIVA advertising credit. That’s a total of $150 of free promotion for your site… not too shabby if you ask us.
IXWebhosting Review – Overall Score: 76/80
IX Webhosting was 3 points shy of the top spot, but comes in a close second. Their best features, aside from unlimited domains, storage, bandwidth, emails, databases and autoresponders, are their advertising credits. They give you double the dollar amount of most hosts that we have reviewed. They also are one of the three hosts to provide free dedicated IP addresses – and they give you 15 of them. Their 3 lifetime domains are a great extra as well. If you don’t need Mambo or Drupal, and you aren’t going to set up a single website that sells physical products via a merchant account, IX is a good webhost. If you are going to set up multiple stores, the 15 dedicated IP addresses may outweigh the fact that you have to purchase your own private SSL certificate. For Internet marketing, affiliate sales, monetized blogs and CPA marketing, IX Webhosting’s 3 free lifetime domains, dedicated IPs, $150 in advertising credits, 30 day money back guarantee and very low hosting cost may be just what you need to get started with very little risk.
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