InterServer Review for 2024

Our InterServer review covers every detail about the provider to help you decide whether it’s worth your money. InterServer has stood out in the market as an eye-catching option for web hosting ever since its launch in 1999.

While it offers a range of hosting types, designed to accommodate diverse needs, it’s also hard to ignore its competitive pricing, reliable services, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That said, is it the best web hosting solution for your needs?

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. InterServer Hosting Plans & Pricing
2. What Hosting Types Does InterServer Offer?
3. InterServer Features
4. How to Set Up InterServer
5. InterServer User Control Panels
6. InterServer Website Migration
7. InterServer Performance
8. Is InterServer Secure?
9. InterServer Reviews from Customers
10. What is InterServer Good For?
11. InterServer vs Top Competitors
12. InterServer Review FAQs
13. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. InterServer Hosting Plans & Pricing
2. What Hosting Types Does InterServer Offer?
3. InterServer Features
Show Full Guide
4. How to Set Up InterServer
5. InterServer User Control Panels
6. InterServer Website Migration
7. InterServer Performance
8. Is InterServer Secure?
9. InterServer Reviews from Customers
10. What is InterServer Good For?
11. InterServer vs Top Competitors
12. InterServer Review FAQs
13. References

InterServer Hosting Plans & Pricing

For our InterServer review, we need to start with something that’s most important to a lot of potential customers – the price.

We love the 30-day money-back guarantee, as well as the price lock guarantee, meaning the price you sign up with is the price you will pay for as long as you stay with InterServer.

But when it comes to pricing tiers for different types of hosting beyond shared, there are also some additional costs:

As most users tend to go for shared hosting plans, we’ll cover each of these in a little more detail below. The most important thing when picking your shared hosting plan is determining what requirements you have for your website needs – you don’t need to overspend if you don’t need big site specifications.

Standard Shared Hosting – from $2.50 per month

With four SQL cores, 200 emails per hour capacity, and 2GB of RAM, we can’t imagine many small businesses would struggle with the specifications at that price.

Intersever will start you off with its standard shared hosting plan. This means that you share the server space with other websites – in most use cases, this is enough.

Moreover, like all shared hosting plans, the Standard plan offers unlimited ultra SSD storage, over 450 cloud app integrations, and InterShield Security as part of the package.

At such a low price, it sounds too good to be true. That’s because, like all InterServer plans, you also need to pay $7.99 to register the domain itself – not something that all hosting providers add as an extra cost. Nevertheless, we rate InterServer to be one of the best cheap website hosting providers around.

Boost 2 Shared Hosting – from $9.95 per month

When you upgrade to Boost 2, you can pretty much consider it as doubling up on the standard plan.

It has all the same features, but all of the numbers double up, for example, 400 emails per hour capacity, 8GB of RAM, and so on. You will of course get everything included in the standard plan, but with a more robust performance overall. It’s ideal for a growing business if you’re starting to outgrow the standard plan.

Boost 4 Shared Hosting – from $19.95 per month

If you’re a larger business with a lot of traffic and emails to handle, Boost 4 shared hosting might be more up your street.

Following the same pattern from Standard to Boost 2, you can once again double up on the specifications to get to Boost 4. While 8GB of RAM should be more than enough to match the 800 emails per hour capacity, you will of course get all of the features in the Standard plan too.

Boost X Shared Hosting – from $69.95 per month

With a high price tag comes an enormous level of capacity for shared hosting. Breaking the mold from the Boost 4 capacity, this pricing tier really takes things up a notch.

You can go well over double in this case, with a massive 20GB of RAM and the capacity to handle 2000 emails per hour.

While this plan will primarily interest larger companies with a lot to manage online, it’s good to know that you can remain on shared hosting with such a high-powered list of specs. Many providers can only offer such powerful abilities on a different type of hosting, like a dedicated server or VPS.

What Hosting Types Does InterServer Offer?

During our InterServer review, we hoped to find it offering hosting types that can empower you and your website. Any good provider should have several different hosting options available – but for you to choose what’s best, you need to understand what each type means.

To summarize its pricing on various plans, you can choose different hosting types within these main options:

• Shared InterServer web hosting from $2.50 per month (Standard plan), making it the perfect place to start.
• Windows ASP.NET hosting plans from $8 per month.
• Reseller hosting from $19.95 per month, but this is for much more specialized web needs.

The Reseller plan is very unique to this platform, which certainly makes it stand out among the competition.

Shared Hosting Services

As the most common option, InterServer offers shared web hosting on its standard plan from $2.50 per month, plus the $7.99 domain fee. Shared hosting means a server’s resources are shared among all websites hosted on that server.

It’s a good solution for small websites and entrepreneurs, and one of the most common types of top hosting solutions for small businesses. InterServer also offers three ‘Boost’ plans within its shared hosting option, meaning you can supercharge features like RAM and hourly email capacity within this hosting type.

Cloud VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting

This cost-effective alternative to dedicated web hosting uses virtualization technology to provide a private hosting resource on a shared server. It splits the server into multiple, private server environments. This is a good choice for mid-sized websites, e-commerce stores, developers, and larger businesses.

InterServer offers Cloud Virtual Private Servers starting from $6 per month. But it has many different types of VPS available within the category.

This type of hosting goes all the way up tp 16 cores, with the price and other specifications increasing accordingly.

For more information about how to choose the best VPS hosting, check out our top VPS hosting reviews.

Dedicated Server Hosting

A hosting environment that is 100% dedicated to your business, dedicated server hosting from InterServer comes with features like DDoS protection and floating IPs (a fixed IP address that can move between different servers to distribute heavy server loads and reduce loading times).

Dedicated server hosting is an excellent solution if you need a highly optimized or secure environment. If your website experiences extremely high traffic, this would also be the most useful type of hosting.

While there’s a plethora of options for dedicated hosting with InterServer, you can find Buy It Now options for immediate set-up, including:

• Xeon E3-1230 v6 for $69 per month
• 2 x Six-Core E5-2620 for $180 per month
• AMD RYZEN 5900X for $180 per month

You can also customize any of InterServer’s range of AMD RYZEN servers starting from $73 per month, depending on the configuration and mount of cores you need.

Rapid deploy servers start at $45 per month, again based on the specs you require for your website.

ASP.NET Web Hosting

As well as the perks included in standard shared hosting plans, this more advanced type of hosting is best for Windows Developers. From $8 per month, the ASP.NET hosting comes equipped with:

• MSSQL
• Five versions of PHP
• Perl
• A free SSL certificate

With Web Deploy and the Plesk control panel, you can simplify your development process if you’re a subscriber to this InterServer plan too.

Reseller Web Hosting

Starting at $19.95, Reseller is a very popular choice for developers and professionals who run and resell many websites.

With such high volumes, it allows for unlimited domain registration and the total space usage across all resold accounts starts at a massive 80GB. General web users won’t need this type of plan, but certain businesses make all their income on this type of work, making this an invaluable option.

Private Email Hosting

InterServer offers everything you need for the best email hosting as part of your business. You get a 25GB mailbox, plus unlimited aliases, group lists, and forwarding.

It integrates with Outlook and you can access it on any mobile device. Moreover, InterServer’s premium filter keeps your inbox clear of spam and viruses for extra peace of mind.

InterServer Features

All good web hosting providers need to display a range of shiny features to catch the eye of our reviewers. Luckily, during our InterServer review, we found a plethora of excellent features available. Notably, the safety and security features were extremely well thought-out.

InterServer Free Website Builder

We loved InterServer’s free drag-and-drop website builder, called SitePad. Equipped with over 300 themes, over 40 widgets, and a simple one-click publisher.

Making websites is easier than ever before, plus it feels encouraging for beginners in particular. While it may not be the best website builder, it’s excellent as an integrated feature.

InterShield Security

InterShield is essentially a layer of added security that ensures your websites stay safe from attacks. We were very impressed with this free service offered to all sites hosted on InterServer.

As InterServer’s in-house security solution, InterShield uses the Litespeed web server and the RBL (real-time blackhole list) rule, blocking any malicious activity such as hacking and uploading of malware from a blacklisted IP. It also checks for hacking strings and immediately blocks any it finds.

Inter-Insurance

This InterServer feature cleans up compromised, hacked, or exploited accounts. It is offered as a service to new, migrating clients in case your website has been attacked in the past.

As part of the service, Inter-Insurance will investigate any weak points and restore them to their original strength. If further action needs to take place, InterServer will fix the underlying causes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Inter-Proxy Caching and CloudFlare

We loved the fact that InterServer offers Inter-Proxy Caching and CloudFlare integration for free.

However, it will only benefit you if the bulk of your site’s visitors are from outside of the U.S. It involves a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which helps to improve page loading speeds, ensuring a better browsing experience.

Choice of Control Panels

As UI is an important part of your everyday use once you’ve built your site, we were impressed to see that InterServer provides a choice of four different user control panels. You can pick from:

• cPanel
• CloudLinux
• Plesk
• DirectAdmin

If you opt for the standard or VPS hosting solutions, DirectAdmin is free. If you want access to the others, they come at a cost. That said, it’s worth it if you’re getting a control panel that you’re used to.

InterServer User Control Panels

There are four control panels for users to choose from. We’ll cover all four in our InterServer review.

With cPanel being the most popular among webmasters, this simple yet powerful control panel can empower many websites. But what else can InterServer’s four control panel options offer to you?

cPanel

If you prefer cPanel, you’ll need to purchase a license. You’ll find this under ‘cPanel hosting’ and pricing starts at $23 per month. With this, you can have a maximum of five admin accounts.

DirectAdmin Panel

We think that DirectAdmin is the best alternative to cPanel, especially when it comes to expandability. This easy-to-use Linux-based control panel helps you maintain your website, and you’ll have this option included in all InterServer hosting packages.

Plesk Control Panel

Plesk offers a centralized control panel on a single dashboard, allowing you to:

• Manage updates
• Handle onboarding
• Monitor performance

Pricing starts at $14 per month, with the possibility of adding ten domains. If you have more domains:

• You can manage unlimited domains on a virtual server for $32 per month.
• You can manage unlimited domains on a dedicated server for $52 per month.

CloudLinux Panel

An excellent choice for businesses, CloudLinux allows you to run any type of Linux distribution without having to worry about server compatibility. It’s certainly more niche and useful for developers than for users who want to build a basic site.

InterServer Website Migration

We checked how easy it is to migrate an existing website to InterServer. InterServer offers this service for free. It should be complete in 24 to 48 hours, and you should experience little to no downtime.

For those who use cPanel, you can also get assistance with all your site files, databases, and emails during migration.

InterServer Performance

With guaranteed 99.9% uptime, InterServer sits proudly among the most reliable options available.

Furthermore, a Sucuri speed test showed a responsive time averaging around five milliseconds.

However, the U.S.-based server locations mean these metrics come from a U.S.-based account. In other words, if you are based in another region, the response time will be slightly longer. We didn’t have any way of testing this, but it’s something to bear in mind if you have an international audience.

Is InterServer Secure?

Security was a hugely important factor in our InterServer review. As well as a free SSL certificate, InterServer provides you with InterShield and Inter-Insurance. These features are free for new migrating users.

• InterShield security. InterShield responds to online attacks by monitoring thousands of servers and websites and replicating protective measures across different servers.
• Inter-Insurance. This works as a backup option only if InterShield fails. It guarantees that the technicians will fix any hacked or compromised accounts, protecting them against future attacks.

InterServer Reviews from Customers

To get a full picture of the brand, we looked at third-party user reviews as part of our own InterServer review.

On Trustpilot, users rated InterServer a very healthy 4.3 out of 5 stars, with many people praising the customer service.

Users also love InterServer’s low costs and fast turnaround times. We thought it was reassuring to see that InterServer responds to all user reviews, even the bad ones.

On that note, some clients say that the live chat feature could be improved – they found it difficult to receive helpful responses.

That said, the wait time can be a few minutes for help. Furthermore, customers said it would be beneficial to have server locations in regions other than the U.S.

What is InterServer Good For?

If you need shared website hosting with a fixed month-to-month payment plan, then InterServer is for you.

The standard plan is extremely cost-effective and packed with useful features for small and medium-sized businesses in particular. InterServer is an excellent choice for business owners who prioritize value more than anything. We also think it’s an excellent choice if you’re looking for top security for your site.

InterServer vs Top Competitors

As InterServer is not the only top web hosting solution on the market, let’s take a look at how it compares to other brands.

InterServer vs Domain.com

Compared to Domain.com, InterSever has a fairly unique pricing model. Domain.com plans will lock you in for at least 12 months, while InterServer offers month-to-month payment which means more flexibility.

Speaking of pricing, while they are both very affordable, InterServer offers free weekly automatic backups where whereas Domain.com demands extra fees for automatic backups.

When it comes to domain registration, Domain.com comes out on top though. You get a free domain name for the first year, while InterServer charges $7.99. That said, this does make sense in light of Domain.com being a domain registrar that offers web hosting, whereas InterServer is purely a web hosting provider.

InterServer vs DreamHost

InterServer might not have been around for as long as DreamHost, but it doesn’t mean the longer-running platform comes out on top.

InterServer offers cPanel hosting, while DreamHost only has a custom control panel. With a potentially steeper learning curve for custom panels, we think cPanel hosting would be the better option.

Other than that, both offer unlimited storage with no limits on the amount of visitors your website can receive. An advantage of DreamHost over InterServer is getting a free domain for a full year. In order to register a domain with InterServer, you need to pay $7.99.

InterServer vs Bluehost

If you have a WordPress website, Bluehost is a great fit. WordPress has had an exclusive partnership with Bluehost since 2005, making it one of the best WordPress hosting providers and you’ll find Bluehost on the WordPress recommendation list, unlike InterServer.

With intelligent WordPress SEO and content tools included, Bluehost also takes the crown as one of the best SEO web hosting providers.

Regarding the amount of data centers, Bluehost comes out on top again. It’s a better fit if the bulk of your visitors come from outside the U.S. Where InterServer proves better is the sheer amount of website cloud applications it offers.

Bluehost has 15 in total, but InterServer has well over 400 to choose from. Other than that, InterServer can offer an unlimited amount of websites in contrast to Bluehost, offering only five in their higher-priced Pro plan.

InterServer Review FAQs