InterServer Review 2024 Pros and Cons
InterServer’s offering is very clear: unlimited resources at low rates. While it delivers on this promise, there aren’t many standout features beyond this. Also, it only has data centers within the US, so it’s not the ideal provider for an international site.
If you’re willing to look past that, though, InterServer provides excellent performance and complete flexibility at competitive prices.
Overview
A Back-To-Basics Host That Actually Delivers
Though InterServer has been around for a while, it doesn’t have the same advertising presence as services like Bluehost or Hostinger. Even without powerful marketing campaigns behind it (or a modern-looking website for that matter), InterServer is still going strong as one of the most popular hosting providers out there. Its user base is vast, it ranks highly in third-party reviews, and you’re bound to find it recommended on many user forums.
I wanted to learn exactly why that was. Does it simply out-price the competition, or does InterServer have some other tricks at its disposal? To find out, I put InterServer through meticulous tests and careful research for over a month. I looked at everything from features, to performance, to its customer support quality.
Long story short, InterServer provides great value if you’re looking for solid core features, good performance, and low prices. However, its lack of standout extra features, a slightly outdated-looking interface, and inconsistent user experience might be enough to turn you in the direction of other, slightly more expensive but more modern hosts.
Is InterServer right for your website? Read on to find out.
Solid Fundamental Features With Few Surprises
Some hosting providers offer all kinds of “wow factor” features like AI tools, proprietary panels, and SEO assistance, but neglect the fundamentals of quality hosting. There’s little sense paying for “the only hosting provider that can also give you a foot massage” if it can’t also deliver good loading speeds, consistent uptime, or a reasonable amount of storage.
InterServer can’t and won’t do anything about your foot aches. What it does offer, however, is high-quality basic tools to ensure your hosting’s speed, reliability, and security.
InterServer’s focus is clear: solid fundamental features, and unlimited storage space and bandwidth for as many sites as your plan can handle, even on entry-level plans. That said, there’s a notable lack of unique elements that make it stand out, like Hostinger’s user-friendly hPanel or Kinsta’s proprietary WordPress optimization tools.
Unlimited Resources on Entry-Level Plans
InterServer offers a wide variety of shared hosting plans at low prices. Its Standard Web Hosting plans run on Linux, and offer everything you’d expect from basic shared hosting.
If you want to upgrade your resources, you can always opt for a Boost plan. This simply boosts the performance of InterServer’s shared hosting plans by allocating extra resources. InterServer is also one of the few hosts to offer shared Windows hosting with its ASP.NET plans.
That’s a greater variety of entry-level plans than many other hosts’ entire offering, but what really sets InterServer apart is that even its most basic plan allows for an unlimited number of websites with unlimited SSD storage, bandwidth, and email accounts. Of course, in practice, the number of sites you can actually run will be limited by the number of vCPUs and the amount of RAM included with a given plan. Still, InterServer is one of the few providers of its class to offer unlimited resources at affordable rates.
Discover More InterServer Features >>
Blazing-Fast Speeds With LiteSpeed Servers
While most shared hosting providers run their servers on the Apache software, InterServer offers LiteSpeed servers from the start. Apache is fine on its own, as it offers a wider range of compatibility with different operating systems. However, it’s not the most well-optimized software for websites based on content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress.
If you want the highest possible performance for a WordPress-based website, then LiteSpeed is by far the best server software available. Not only does it do a better job handling dynamic content, but WordPress even includes a specialized plugin for optimizing LiteSpeed caching: the aptly named LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress Plugin (LSCWP). This plugin can greatly increase loading times for any WordPress site hosted on a LiteSpeed server.
Though you can install OpenLiteSpeed (LiteSpeed’s free version) or LiteSpeed with almost any hosting provider, the process can be fairly complicated and often costs extra. InterServer is one of the few providers to offer LiteSpeed web servers pre-installed with its regular hosting plans.
Keep Your Site Secure With Inter-Insurance
Not every provider places enough weight on security features for shared hosting plans. That’s doubly concerning when shared hosting can often be more vulnerable to DDoS attacks and data scams. InterServer does things differently by including its Inter-Insurance service on all plans.
That’s the branded way of saying that InterServer will provide full account restoration on all compromised accounts, as well as active prevention to ensure that your hosting remains secure.
Besides Inter-Insurance, you also get InterShield Security, which gathers data from every server hosted with InterServer. It then applies custom security rules after any attack, ensuring that the same one can never be repeated across the host’s network.
Different Hosting for Different Needs
Though the main focus of this review is on InterServer’s shared hosting plans, I’d be remiss not to mention that it offers an incredible variety of other hosting types. If you’re looking for something more powerful, InterServer offers virtual private servers (VPSs) and dedicated server hosting at reasonable rates.
VPSs are a great step up from normal shared hosting. Though they require a bit more technical knowledge (especially since InterServer doesn’t offer managed VPSs), they are also far more powerful. If you want even more resources and control over your hosting, InterServer has an impressive variety of dedicated server configurations, including GPU-based dedicated servers.
InterServer Features at a Glance
Not a Terrible User Experience, but It Can Get Frustrating at Times
More than anything else, InterServer suffers from being outdated. Not technology-wise, mind you. Even the cheapest VPS package available includes an incredibly powerful 24-core processor and DDR4 RAM, and InterServer even offers dedicated GPU servers running off 4080 RTXs. Which is techy mumbo-jumbo for high-performance, modern hardware.
However, InterServer’s user experience could use a fresh coat of paint. The user interface (UI) is grey, boring, and weirdly segmented, like something that would fit right in on an old Windows XP machine. And when it comes to managing your hosting, you could spend a considerable amount of time setting up processes that other hosts streamline into a couple of clicks.
It’s not unintelligible by any means, but I’d be lying if I said the overall setup process didn’t frustrate me.
Creating a New Account With InterServer
To create a new account with InterServer, the first thing you have to do is head over to InterServer.net, select your desired hosting plan, and click on the over-enthusiastic “Buy Now!” button. After that, InterServer will ask you to input your desired domain name, followed by the usual required information like name, address, and phone number.
Then you’ll have the option to add domain registration and Whois privacy to your package, select your billing interval (every 1, 6, 12, or 24 months), add coupons, and select “continue.” Once your payment has been processed, InterServer will send you a confirmation email. Once you activate your account through email, you’ll be able to access the InterServer control panel.
There, you can easily access your hosting plan by selecting the “web hosting” panel and clicking on the gear icon next to your hostname. InterServer doesn’t offer a proprietary hosting management panel like some other hosts, nor does it include cPanel like most others.
So, if you want to manage your hosting without any add-on costs, you’ll have to do it through DirectAdmin. In my professional opinion, this is a perfectly acceptable way to manage hosting – but in my personal opinion, it comes across as cheap and unintuitive.
Though DirectAdmin can get the job done as well as any other hosting management panel, it can be harder to navigate, especially if you’re a beginner.
Discover More InterServer Features >>
Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress
I’ll be honest, I don’t usually even have to think about this part of the process since it takes less than 10 minutes with most hosts. My experience with InterServer was different, and not in a good way.
Even when you buy your domain with InterServer, InterServer won’t point your domain name to your hosting automatically – you’ll have to do it yourself. This involves going into the “DNS management” tab of your InterServer control panel and updating your DNS records to connect to your domain under the “Hosting” tab of your InterServer dashboard. After that, you then have to go into DirectAdmin and make sure to duplicate the changes there. InterServer shows a message that says that “DNS changes might take up to 24 hours to take effect.”
After four days, my domain name still wouldn’t point to my hosting, so I contacted customer support. It was only after I filled a ticket that a support representative told me that my domain name was now connected. I checked all the domain records for changes, but everything looked the same. I’m still not sure what the problem was.
I had a similar issue activating a free SSL Lets Encrypt certificate to my domain, which also took a couple of days to get solved, and only after I contacted support. Once my domain pointed to my hosting (and I was sure it had an active SSL certificate), I installed WordPress with the Softaculous auto-installer tool in DirectAdmin.
If you’re thinking of using InterServer for your WordPress hosting, my recommendation is to start with contacting support from the get-go. Even if it’s for simple things you know how to do, InterServer’s process was finicky enough that it’s better to let the support team guide you through it.
Weekly Automatic Backups
Creating and managing backups for your site can be easy to forget about, especially if you’re a one-person operation. However, it’s still crucial that you take regular backups – you may never need them, but if you do, you’ll be glad to have them.
Luckily, InterServer offers free weekly backups with every plan. That way, you can rest assured that your site’s information gets saved periodically. What’s more, you can also create manual backups at any time. This ensures that your site’s information is secure.
Extensive Email Features
Not only does InterServer offer unlimited email accounts with any plan, it also includes a plethora of advanced email-management features to help fine-tune your email to your specific needs. With InterServer, you can access your email through any device, get guaranteed delivery, and even advanced spam filtering tools.
Impressive Loading Speed for Audiences in the USA
InterServer’s value proposition is supposed to be straightforward: shared hosting with unlimited resources and top performance, but at affordable rates. I had my issues with the sign-up process, the DirectAdmin control panel, and InterServer’s lack of standout features. However, I hoped InterServer’s performance made up for all of that. Did it?
To save you the suspense, it does. InterServer can deliver very good performance across North America, and decent performance around the world even with US-only data centers.
To properly test InterServer’s performance, I put it through our standard testing procedure for web hosts. We take pride in our testing process – you can check out the full details here.
The abridged version is this: We built a completely functional landing page filled with HD images, scrolling effects, and everything else you’d expect from a typical landing page in 2024. Then, we hosted it using InterServer’s Standard Web Hosting plan and monitored it to get a complete overview of its performance, uptime, and global reach. You can keep reading to discover the in-depth results.
GTMetrix
We use GTMetrix to test the local performance of each host. For InterServer’s entry-level plan, I set up an hourly loading speed monitor on a server in Wyoming.
My site retained typical loading speeds of about 1.2s, with only one unsightly spike in loading time across the two weeks of testing.
The overall results were very good to decent. A single out-of-the-ordinary spike in loading speed is nothing to worry about, although loading times did sometimes creep past the 2 second mark, which is a concern, but not a deal-breaker.
Sucuri Load Time Tester
To gauge the global reach of each site, we use the Sucuri Load Time Tester tool. The only downside to this tool is that some hosts block it in certain regions. This means that sometimes a “could not test website from this server” error message isn’t proof of failure, just failure to get proof.
Going in, I was expecting InterServer’s Sucuri Load Time Tester results to be extremely poor. After all, InterServer’s data centers are limited to the US, and I had no content delivery network (CDN) active for my site, as we test the default vendor plans to see what a beginner user will get if they don’t tweak the settings at all.
However, the results ended up being surprisingly positive. Not only did InterServer perform well in the area it was supposed to, but my site even got loading times of under two seconds as far away as western Europe.
Still, if you’re planning on hosting an international-reaching site with InterServer, installing a CDN is a must. That shouldn’t be too much of a problem though, since InterServer offers easy integrations with CloudFlare’s CDN.
UptimeRobot
Just like most other hosting providers (at least those that are worth your time) InterServer promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee. In other words, you should feel confident knowing that your website is up and running the vast majority of the time.
I used UptimeRobot to make sure that InterServer lived up to its promise, and in the end, it over-delivered. Not only did it manage the promised 99.9% uptime, but during the entire testing process there wasn’t a single instance of downtime. You really can’t ask for better results than 100%.
My Support Experience Was Very Disappointing
As mentioned, I had to go back and forth with support to set up my WordPress website in the first place, but I ended up using the ticket system quite a few times more. First, I wanted to know where my site’s data center was located, since that information wasn’t available at sign-up or through DirectAdmin. I got a clear and quick response, if not very elaborate.
The trouble began when I tried asking for something a little heftier from support. As part of a separate review, I was also looking to test InterServer’s VPS capabilities. So, once the testing period was over, I began the process of switching to a VPS server. When I asked support if they could help me upgrade my plan and move my website, the response was “yes,” but only if I were to buy a higher-tier plan.
Not only that, but to migrate my website I’d have to buy a plan with four cores, which was simply not what I set out to test. Eventually, I figured that it would be easier just to purchase the VPS and install the test site manually. I have some experience handling servers, and I figured that if worse came to worst, I could lean back on InterServer’s customer support. I was wrong, to put it mildly.
Moving my hostname to my VPS and setting up the free, supposedly-included DirectAdmin access took me over four days in total. In the end, it wasn’t support that guided me into eventually getting it to work, but an obscure Reddit thread.
At the end of the day, InterServer’s support team did answer all of my questions quickly. And though no support agent went above and beyond, I can at least say that they addressed the basics of each message. It wasn’t the worst customer support experience in the world, but it was definitely enough to sour my impression.
InterServer Is Affordable (Even After Renewal)
Unlike most other web hosts, InterServer’s Standard Web Hosting plan doesn’t incur variable per-month costs depending on the length of your billing period. You could sign up for monthly billing or pay for up to two years in advance, and the price would still come out to E£185 per month for your initial term.
Not only is this price very competitive, but InterServer’s post-renewal price increase is reasonable as well for what you get in the package – it’s a fair bit more than the initial price, but if you compare what other providers charge for entry-level packages that are limited in the number of sites or the amount of storage, it’s still a bargain.
The renewal price is also the same regardless of the length of the billing period, so if you’re looking to sign up for a plan without having to commit for two, three, or even four years, this is an ideal option for you.
This isn’t exclusive to the standard shared hosting plan either. InterServer’s Boost plans, ASP. NET plans, and VPS plans all follow the same billing logic. So, if you’re looking for a host that offers no-commitment monthly payments, InterServer is one to consider.
How does InterServer match up to the competition?
InterServer REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend InterServer’s entry-level plan for absolute beginners, as it does require more technical work than those of some other shared hosting providers. If this doesn’t scare you off, though, InterServer delivers outstanding performance and solid fundamental features at affordable monthly rates – with no long-term commitment required.
If you’re looking for a reliable and affordable shared hosting plan, and you don’t need many advanced features (like a proprietary control panel), then InterServer is definitely worth considering.
FAQ
What is InterServer?
InterServer is a hosting provider that offers all kinds of hosting, from shared hosting to specialized, dedicated servers. It’s also one of the more affordable hosts out there, and one of the few that offers decent monthly pricing with no long-term commitment.
Is InterServer good for small businesses?
Yes, so long as you’re OK with some technical set-up work in the beginning. Thanks to InterServer’s affordable prices and reliable performance, it can be a great budget option for small businesses.
Does InterServer really offer unlimited resources?
Yes! Even with the entry-level plan, InterServer offers unlimited storage space, bandwidth, and email accounts, and you can host as many websites as the vCPUs and RAM on your plan will allow. If you’re looking to host a resource-heavy website, InterServer’s Boost or VPS plans are a good budget choice.
Is InterServer better than Hostinger?
That depends on what you’re looking for. Hostinger is very similar in price, and also offers the LiteSpeed web server, but it doesn’t offer the unlimited resources that InterServer does. However, some will find InterServer to be less user-friendly and less packed with features.
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