1774 Dividend Drive
Columbus, Ohio 43228
1-800-835-0450
IXWebHosting.com began supporting their first web hosting customers from a server located inside an employee’s living room in 1999, and they’ve been growing and going strong ever since. Today, IX hosts more than 500,000 websites from their data center in Columbus, OH, and offers shared, VPS and Cloud Windows and Linux hosting services.
Review
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Sales
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IXWebHosting.com takes sales inquiries via a toll-free telephone number, live chat and email. I popped over to live chat to ask IX where their data center was located and whether or not they supported a certain Wordpress script. I was able to connect with a sales representative within six minutes of my initial inquiry, though that particular agent could not tell me where IX’s data center was located. He did, however, pass me along to another sales rep that promptly finished answering my questions and wished me a good day. Both IX sales team members were polite and eager to answer my questions as quickly as possible.
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Setup
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I invested in a shared Linux hosting plan with IX and had an invoice in my email inbox within minutes of paying, and a welcome letter and instructions on how to go about setting up my account the following day. Though IX advertises instant setup, that wasn’t the case with my hosting account; there was an almost eight hour wait between the time that the receipt for my purchase was received and my account details were made available.
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Billing
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I found the IX billing department to be reliable and accurate. I chose month-to-month billing and received an invoice, as expected, at the same time each month. I was also able to cancel my services without incurring unexpected charges or being billed for something that I had not ordered.
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Pricing
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IXWebHosting.com’s Expert plan is advertised at $3.95 per month. However, when I went to checkout, I soon discovered that if I didn’t pay two years in advance, the actual price was $9.95/month and carried a $30 setup fee. That price well exceeds average—even without the hefty setup fee. All of IX’s plans are priced similarly, with the advertised price only being extended to those who pay two years in advance.
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Reliability
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My website stayed up consistently during my stay with IX, though every afternoon after it first went online, my domain seemed to crawl to a halt, often taking 30-seconds or longer to load a single page. Assuming I was on an overloaded machine, I asked to be moved to a different web hosting server, but was denied. Instead, IX assured me that the problem would be resolved within 24-hours. Five days later when my site was still slowing to a crawl in late afternoons I asked again to be moved and this time, IX agreed. Once on the new server, I had no speed or reliability issues of any kind.
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Help & Support
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IX does seem to go out of their way to try and please customers, but it seems that not all support personnel have been properly trained. Much like the sales team, I often had to go through one or two support team members to find the one person that could give me an answer as to why my website was running slowly or when routine maintenance would be completed. The support team is very friendly, but it can be time consuming to wait for a knowledgeable operator to handle certain issues. IX offers support by phone, live chat and email.
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Uptime
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I use a premium uptime monitor to keep track of my many domains. During the nine months I hosted with IX my website was reliably online, but for a handful of times when routine maintenance was taking place.
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Guarantee
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99.9% uptime guarantee
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30-day money back guarantee
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Terms of Service
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IXWebHosting.com’s Terms of Service are available online. Highlights include:
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All customers must be 18 years of age or older.
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Adult and trademarked or copyrighted work not permitted.
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Spamming prohibited.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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7-day free trial.
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2 free dedicated IPs.
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Free domain with some plans.
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Easy-to-use and understand control panel.
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Live chat and toll-free telephone support.
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Disadvantages
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Prices are very misleading.
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Support team not knowledgeable enough to handle many issues.
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Routine maintenance only announced on Twitter and company website, not by email or within the control panel.
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Servers possibly overloaded or undermanaged as evidenced by slow load web pages at certain hours of the day.
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