Interserver Review – The Best Unlimited Hostgator Alternative

I know it's been awhile since my last article on here, so I thought I'd try to get back into the groove with this Interserver Review.  Haven't heard of Inteserver? Well this outfit is truly a gem in the crowded field of web hosting and a great Hostgator alternative, Bluehost alternative, or other Endurance International Group (EIG) alternative if you are looking for “unlimited” shared web hosting. Anyway let's get started with this review shall we.

Adam's Interserver Review

Interserver has been in the web hosting business for quite a long time, even if they are not that well known. The company was started back in 1999 by two friends, Michael Lavrik and John Quaglieri.  Pretty interesting story as Lavrik and Quaglieri started this web hosting company when they were just 15 years old. They rented out server space and grew their customer base from there.  A few years later they decided to construct their own datacenter and they are still in business today. I don't know about you but back when I was 15 I was more interested in looking at scantily glad girls then worrying about starting a web hosting business. (This might still be true today.)

I found Interserver when I was researching Litespeed web hosting companies. Litespeed is is a server operating system which supposedly helps manage system resources better than what the majority of web hosting companies use, Apache. Interserver is listed as a hosting partner on Litespeed's website.  I noticed some good reviews of them, mainly for VPS (virtual private servers), on a few places and thought I'd give them a shot for one of my websites which is news and review based. We migrated to Interserver from Siteground, while a good web hosting company, sometimes just felt a little slow and overpriced for what you got.

What type of service does Interserver provide? Read on my friend.

Speed

Many webmasters, bloggers, etc. are concerned with site speed. People don't like waiting around for sites to load and studies have shown people bounce if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to display in a browser. Siteground had some built-in caching tools you could utilize in the backend dashboard, but typically I found for my news site these never worked to speed things up as expected.  Sometimes Siteground caching conflicted with the caching plugin we already had installed.  Google also takes speed as a factor in SEO (search engine optimization) and SERP (search engine results pages) these days.

When we moved the site we had with to Interserver, I noticed our average load times dropped from 10 seconds to 2 seconds.  I used WebPageTest.org and Google's Speed tool and both showed a noticably improvement. We didn't touch or change anything else except move the site to Interserver. Server pings generally average less than 100ms, they usually are around 70ms. As a comparison I know with a few EIG hosts these days if you ping the server you can expect responses in the 500ms range.

There are certain times of the day I've noticed where speed fluctuates, but this is to be expected with shared web hosting. Bottom line slower sites means less visitors, and less revenue. With Interserver we've generally been happy with the speeds for this WordPress website.

Customer Support

How is Interserver customer support? Absolutely incredible! The customer support team is knowledgeable and always willing to help solve even complex problems. John Quaglieri, who is a co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), often answers tickets and helps work through issues. I've been impressed with his dedication to support.

Most of the Interserver support team is outsourced with most of the technical people in India. Some people may have a problem with outsourcing support but I've found this hasn't been an issue. All the support I've received from the Indian technical support team has been top notch.

I did call Interserver once and I thought I'd get a support person based in India. It was actually someone at their New Jersey datacetner facility, at least I assume.  The guy had a Northeast accent. So not everything is outsourced.

What about ticket response time? I've experienced responses that are immediate. Longest I've waited is probably over a hour and that was usually for an issue that needed to be looked into.  Generally you'll wait a few minutes to 30 minutes. In my book that is a great response time for tickets for a web hosting company.

Interserver offers ticket, chat, and phone support.  A lot of companies only do ticket support these days.  If you need help or have questions you can reach them 24/7.

Pricing – Interserver Hosting Plans

Interserver only offers one shared hosting plan which offers Unlimited domains, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, etc. Pricing for month to month for the shared web hosting plan is $4.95 with options to pay in 6 months, yearly, 2 years upfront, or even 3 years upfront.  The longer you sign-up for the greater your discount is. I have two shared hosting plans with Interserver.

If you ever need to upgrade your hosting plan from shared web hosting Interserver offers a nice amount of options.  Specifically the VPS and dedicated hosting plans.

For Cloud VPS hosting the plans start at $6 for 25 gigabytes of space and 1,000 gigabytes of bandwidth transfer. That's a pretty damn good deal. If you want extras like cPanel it is $10 per month, Softaculous $2, and extra IPs $1.  That means to get a managed VPS with cPanel you could get for $16 a month.  If you check around most managed Cloud VPS plans, with cPanel, are going to cost you $30 you or more a month.

If I was going to upgrade to VPS hosting, I would definitely go with an Interserver plan.  It is reasonable priced and easy to add more slices, ie capacity, as needed which is always a plus in my book. Extra Interserver VPS slices are an extra $6 per month which won't break the bank if I needed to upgrade too. Also they just added a nice iPhone app for managing a Cloud VPS from your smartphone. I have an Android but I still think that's a nice feature for Interserver VPS customers.

If you are interested in dedicated servers they have great pricing on those as well.  The dedicated servers plans start at $59 per month, which is another great deal if you check around for dedicated server prices.

Interserver also offers reseller hosting plans and colocation, which means that you own the server hardware and they just host it in their datacenter.  They also have Quick Servers plans which are slightly above their Cloud VPS web hosting options.  These plans are faster to deploy ,compared to their dedicated servers, since they utilize cloud virtualization but come with the power and capacity of a dedicated server.  Interserver Quick Servers start at $95 a month.  If I had high traffic sites, I would definitely consider one of these Quick Server plans.

Another nice thing is that the price you pay when you sign-up is locked for the life of the account. They have a “Price Lock Guarantee” which is nice. I've been with some web hosting companies that do not grandfather pricing.

Use coupon code – SAVEINTER – and only pay 1 cent your first month with Interserver

Final Thoughts on Interserver

How can Interserver offer such competitive and low pricing or shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated web hosting? It's simple, they own and operate their own datacenter in Seacus, New Jersey.  What a lot of web hosting companies do is rent out servers from datacenters around the United States and other countries.  Since Intserver operates their own datacenter, and does not rent, they pass on the savings to customers.

The pricing for shared, VPS, and dedicated server plans is kind of unbeatable considering everything you get.  Support, speed, knowledge, and hardware are just all incredible. I've looked around and used many different hosting companies and Interserver is extremely competitive in the hosting marketplace.

Since the company has been in business awhile you know you are in good hands and I've been recommending Interserver for awhile now. I have not heard any complaints and really only hear good experiences from people I refer.  If you are looking for a HostGator alternative, BlueGost alternative, HostMonster alternative, JustHost alternative or pretty much any Endurance International Group web host company I think you should definitely switch to Interserver. Especially if you want to get an “unlimited” web hosting plan.

Site5 used to be be good EIG alternative host for unlimited shared web hosting.  However they were recently bought out. I have not heard complaints about the server and I still recommend Site5, you can read my Site5 Review too, but Interserver is the best alternative from what I've seen.

Do you have any questions, concerns or comments about Interserver? Do you like, or dislike, my Interserver Review?  Leave a comment below and let me know. I always enjoy hearing comments and questions from readers.

Editors' Note – I have included affiliate links in this Interserver Review.  That means if you use the link, or coupon code SAVEINTER, I get a commission. If you have received benefit from this review I'd apprecaite if you use the affiliate links. It helps keep things running around here and makes me continue to write helpful web hosting reviews like this one.