Best And Cheapest Website Hosting, Interserver

Nine months ago, I purchased a plan with InterServer for $2 a month. Today I have 9 months’ worth of data, measuring how often my website went down, I have speed tests and the opportunity to compare it to 12 other web hosting providers that I've used this year. Now it's time to show what I've learned and answer the question – is InterServer a good choice to host your website? And boy, do I have a lot to say. Let's start with the design.

I believe that the worst thing about InterServer is the interface and the controls. They're just confusing if you're a first-time website owner. For example,

 here, I've only purchased web hosting, but my control panel actively displays every single service that InterServer is offering. Twice. Even though most of them are completely empty. And if I want to go ahead and work on my website.

I need to click like the smallest little buttons on the screen there is to get to the real control panel where I have the option to install WordPress, create my email accounts, set up backups, basically do the important stuff. It feels like it was made by an engineer, not a designer. In general, I've noticed that interserver often uses this mentality, it needs to work well, not look good.

But I guess it pays off, because it does work well. It's snappy, there's no lag and no excessive loading screens. Honestly, you'll probably only use like 5 buttons in this whole interface and then just forget that it even exists. So, after you've done it once, or you've seen someone do the set to process once, it's smooth sailing from there on out. To create my website, I was able to use the Interserver's automatic WordPress installer, no problems here as well.

I only needed to create my login details and press install. However, I still needed to actually design my website, because the default installation looks like this. So, to get my website design I've decided to download a pre-made template from Envato Elements, then I just uploaded the template to Interserver via the WordPress dashboard and boom, I had a fully editable website, ready for testing. Now

Why would I use a pre-made downloadable website template instead of something I made myself? Because I want something that's realistic. Most people are building their websites this way and these templates are often poorly optimized due to a lot of excess code, but they look great. Imagine if I was testing running shoes. If I give them to an Olympic runner, of course the performance is gonna be great. The real test is seeing how good an average Joe does. So.

As soon as I get the design loaded in, I immediately got a plugin called WPBenchmark, allowing me to get some insight into how well the server my website is on performs. I ran the test and here's where the holes in this $2.5 plan started to show. CPU and memory were good, file systems were great, but the database score was pretty bad. I ran the test three times, and it seems like the server just.

couldn't handle complex or large amounts of data uploaded in a short period of time, but it could handle simple queries extremely well. And this makes perfect sense, because these inter-server plans can only handle 30 processes every second, so anything beyond that is like trying to squeeze 31 people through the door at the same time. It just doesn't work; you need a larger door. But 30 is still a generous amount.

other cheap plans like Hostinger only offer 10 and Bluehost doesn't even disclose this, but I imagine it's also 10 or probably even lower. After testing out the raw server specs I wanted to do some real-life test. So, I simply cloned my website onto Bluehost and Hostinger servers,

 running their premium and plus plans. Then I recorded myself loading the page in incognito mode and compared the real-time loading speed Bluehost came dead last and InterServer actually came out first. To see why this is happening, we can use a tool called GTmetrix.

This is a test for my InterServer site, let's decode this information. My website fully loaded in 1.2 seconds, but it's loaded in segments. Before one segment is done, another one can't start. So there's a snowball effect. If one thing is slow, it slows down another thing, and that thing slows down another thing.

I think you probably get the point. So the first thing that happens when a website is loaded is always waiting for the server to respond. That's called the TTFB. In this case it was 150 milliseconds for interserver. And here's a good example of how fast things get out of control. So Bluehost TTFB was 400 milliseconds. Only roughly two and a half times more.

but the final loading time was almost 4 times slower due to the snowball effect. Anyways, taking all of these tests into consideration, I wouldn't go ahead and host an e-commerce store where people need to perform a lot of actions on your website, constantly clicking and interacting with your database, but for anything else, a 6.9 out of 10 for just $2.50 is pretty incredible value.

If you plan to go the e-commerce route or just expect more visitors and more queries to your database, check out their Boost 2 and Boost 4 plans. They scale really well, giving you 2 or 4 times more resources to work with. But how does pricing actually work on Interserver? Well, it does use the classic web hosting scam, where it's cheap at first and then it ramps the prices up.

So when you're on the checkout page, you'll have the option to get billed for 1 month, 6 months, 12 months or 24 months. The first time you get billed, you'll get the discounted price. But after your first bill, the price will increase from $2.50 to $7 and it'll stay like that for all future payments, sadly. Naturally, the best deal is picking up a 2-year plan. Actually, if you use this link click HERE.

You can also get the first month for just 1 cent, so it totals out to 57 dollars for 2 years of some pretty good web hosting. You can also deactivate the add-ons to save some extra cash. And you can totally do just like 1 month for 2.5 dollars and then cancel, especially if you're doing a temporary website. For example, I've had my website up and running now for 9 months, so I've essentially spent 20 bucks on it. But...

Throughout this whole time, it was only offline for 69 minutes. And most of these downtimes were less than 10 minutes. So, it's definitely not something that's groundbreaking. I'd say this is probably some of the best $20 I've spent and taking everything into consideration I highly recommend you check out InterServer if you're on the market for a website. See ya!

INTETRSERVER

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