InterServer Review: What we have learned after using it! (2021)

If you’ve been reading some of my other reviews, you know I love a good underdog.

InterServer is one of the BEST underdogs in the hosting world:

It’s not nearly as famous as a lot of other hosting companies, nor does it support millions of sites.

But, it’s been around since 1999, when it was founded by two high-school students. So it’s been in the game for 20 years, and has a classic humble-beginnings story.

What’s not to like?

Oh yeah, you haven’t heard of it before.

Well, even if YOU haven’t heard of InterServer, some other people have.

And this is what happened:

So clearly, InterServer isn’t just some nobody.

But wait, how come you haven’t heard of it, even though it seems so well-received?

Well, it’s complicated. But that’s what I’m going to talk to you about here: to an extent, InterServer is underrated and a good option.

…But there are also some flaws that have kept its profile down.

You’ll see as we get into it. Let’s start with:

InterServer Review: Uptime

Uptime is one of the most important things in hosting—after all, you’re paying to have a site hosted, meaning paying for it to be up and available.

Hm. This may be one of the reasons why InterServer isn’t the most discussed host.

To be frank, an uptime of 99.43% is way BELOW standard, especially because this was just over a single week.

My standard is 99.95% over a MONTH—which amounts to about 21 minutes of downtime a month or 5 minutes of downtime is measuring weekly.

So look. I don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh. But this is just realistic:

The uptime is poor.

Now, there is a BIT of good news:

The response times are excellent. Uptime is usually the most important, but good speeds help keep visitors on your site and keep you up in Google’s search rankings.

So with that bit of good news, here’s my overall take on InterServer’s performance:

It’s still poor. The uptime isn’t good enough for people with ecommerce needs to trust, but others who are less stringent about uptime may find it worth their time. Plus, who knows—it could just be my bad luck.

I can’t lie: InterServer’s on thin ice, and we’re still in the beginning of the review. Luckily, this next section will help their case:

InterServer Review: Pricing and Features

We all care about the amount we pay—even if some of us care or more or less than others.

No matter what your budget is though, you want to make sure you’re at least getting a good set of STUFF for your price.

AND, you want to have a lot of OPTIONS, especially where hosting is concerned, as everyone has different online needs.

This is one of the BEST things about InterServer: it’s got a ton of hosting options AND good deals.

Even for just web hosting, InterServer has got 3 main choices—and no, NOT as in three tiers of the same type of hosting.

Here’s the first—the basic shared web hosting that you’re used to:

On the face of it, this is a little more expensive than the starting prices of most standard web hosting.

BUT, there are two important things you need to keep in mind:

Firstly, there isn’t a tiered system. In other words, this is the only “standard” (basic) shared hosting plan offered by InterServer.

In effect, it’s a one-size-fits-all solution, so you’re not purchasing first-tier capabilities, but second and third-tier shared hosting abilities (to compare to other companies).

It’s pretty much a fully-featured, shared web hosting package. No limits are placed on anything.

And some things are ESPECIALLY nice:

Storage is RAID-10, which on most hosts is something you’d only get with dedicated servers or other premium plans.

Plus, CloudFlare CDN is included for free, as well as weekly backups. Some hosts offer daily backups, so this is unfortunate, but still okay.

Some people might complain about the monthly bandwidth limits.

Here’s the thing:

ON PAPER, limits of any kind don’t look great. But realistically, the reseller hosting plans are still shared hosting plans. Because of this, there are just realistic limits on how much can be accommodated.

Placing these limits ensures you can sell realistically to your clients without crashing shared server resources.

And honestly, these limitations are pretty reasonable, especially per the price.

If you remember that each account gets a cPanel (with unlimited cPanel accounts) and all standard web hosting features—which are really solid—then I think InterServer’s reseller program is SOLID.

The Virtual Private Server options.

Here’s why I’m impressed with InterServer’s VPS options:

There are SO many. In fact, there’s SO much I can’t even go through them all in detail. So briefly, here are the different offerings.

First up, we have general cloud VPS plans.

You won’t believe it:

It STARTS at $6 a month.

$6 a month for 30GB of SSD space, 2TB of data transfer, and just over 2GB of RAM. That is just insane—almost no VPS plans start at $6 a month.

But it’s not a scam. This is what the max option is:

For just under a $100 a month, you can get 16 cores, 16TB of data transfer, and just over 32GB of RAM.

That’s a super BUFF VPS plan. A lot of major competitors don’t even offer that many cores or levels of RAM, and that’s a super decent price for it too.