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Performance 5 Reliability 5 Customer Relations   5 Features 6 Control Panel 7 60%

FULL User Reviews and Ratings of PowWeb

Overall, Close to Outstanding - Review by B. Bancroft submitted on April 22, 2003
Overall Ratings: 9 out of 10
I switched to PowWeb 5 months ago on a whim while trying to find a cheaper host. Not knowing what to expect at first, I've been very pleasantly surprised. My site has been up almost all of the time (only one prolonged downtime comes to mind - and by "prolonged" I mean a few hours) and they really have outstanding forums, where you can ask any questions you may have about account setup, implementation, web design, etc. They also offer an inordinate amount of space (recently raised to 500 MB and 30GB of bandwith a month. For $7.77 a month, PowWeb is tough to beat. The only reason I give them a 9 instead of a 10 is that it has taken them a day or two to reply to e-mails a few times (not a problem because I can almost always get an answer from a PowWeb representative within minutes in the forums).

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Poorest service I've ever seen. - Review by Randall J. submitted on April 22, 2003
Overall Ratings: 1 out of 10
Powweb is by far the worst service provider of any kind I have ever dealt with. Thier tech support is practically non-existent. What little bit of help you get is excuses, or out right lies. Thier incompetence caused more downtime than I have ever had in my entire career on the internet. In my short term of 3 months I spent on thier servers I had more problems with my website than I have ever had from any provider on any long term contract.

Their administrators are never there, even if they are they don't care. The typical response time to fix server issues is usually 12 or more hours. If you have a problem Tech support can't help you because an admin is not around right now.. When you ask, when will they be around the typical answer is "I don't know". Email support is equally useless you'll have to wait 2-3 days for a reply,(unless you consider a robot a reply) if you get one at all.

Don't let the prompt replies from thier sales staff fool you! They're more than willing to rope you in and rip you off! Thier online forums are edited from people speaking the truth about thier poor service. I have seen this done on many occasions on posts from several people.

All of these problems I have had with PowWeb are documented and available for review.

Honestly, I'm not sure how anyone other than a throw away website could ever consider them reliable.
They report a 99% uptime, but just because their servers reply to a ping does not mean they are functioning properly. Yet as far as they are concerned the servers are up and they are not responsible if your site is down.

The worst fact of all is that several times my website had been down, or inoperable due to thier own mistakes and they offered no concern, or credit to that fact. Even though the website is totally dead, when seconds ago it was working fine without any changes. Even with thier own mistakes just because the server responds to a ping they consider it still up so they figure thats all that matters.

The fact that the majority of golden reviews to balance things out are from people who moderate thier forums should tell you something! Even one of thier admin had to cast a vote!

How honest can they be?

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Mysterious, but great! - Review by Garywise submitted on April 18, 2003
Overall Ratings: 10 out of 10
I was turned on to Powweb in 2001 by a colleague, and have used them for almost a year, with no problems, no major downtime, and positive service experiences.

Everything is controlled through easy panels, and they keep excellent records and stats. Since I started ( I now host 8 sites with them) they have (over) doubled the storage, mailboxes and traffic allowed for the $8 a month! They're faster than some of the hosts my clients had previously, too.

If you (gasp!) use 'Front Page', the extensions are free at the click of a button.

Installing cgi/perl scripts is very easy, as all the required path information is on their extensive 'FAQ' section.

I get $15 referral credits, and a six-month "just 'cos" freebie recently. I do not work for them, I'm not an investor, just a more than satisfied customer.

I can't find any info on the web except their homepage, and was looking for one when I found this one review!

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One Plan, One Price. - Review by atsang submitted on April 18, 2003
Overall Ratings: 10 out of 10

It is unusual for me to use a service without first asking around, or if nobody has introduced it to me. However, when I was very frustrated with Homestead, I stumbled into PowWeb and found this down-to-earth service, which seemed interesting me. PowWeb hosting is inexpensive, if it didn't perform as well as I hoped, I wouldn't have a lot to lose. So, I signed up and used their subsidiary site to register my domain. It has been a few months now.

The registration of a domain went very smoothly, the availability and a construction page was up within 24 hours like the normal standard. As for web hosting, so far I have made three complaints, and all three times I got satisfactory answers from PowWeb, and the problems were resolved within 12 hours or less. These problems included: (1) Somebody tried to run script on the server for my site that caused a complete shut down of the server. (2) PowWeb had a hardware problem. (3) I detected a slowness when I tried to FTP new pages to the server some day ago, while it usually takes about 5 minutes to upload my 60 pages. PowWeb's explanation was that they were having some trouble with SprintNet, who is one of their backbone providers. But they have additional bandwidth on order from both Verizon and Pbi.net.

Good Customer/Technical Support
By no means I'm a patient person, so when there was a problem, I would first send an email, and followed by a phone call. Although I didn't have any luck with their toll-free number, reaching a person at PowWeb by calling their technical support worked out fine. They explained to me what the problems were, and answered each and every question with a solution. As well, they also replied to all my emails. Last but not the least, they gave me a month's credit for causing the inconvenience. No, this is not a biggie, but I appreciate the fact that they cared about their customers. And it seems that they provide what they promise, and strive to do the best they can.

PowWeb Deal
Their "One Plan, One Price" pure web hosting service comes with a 30-day money back guarantee is rather straight-forward, and there isn't any setup fee. The domain registration is $15 a year. For $7.77 a moth, I get 100 MB storage, 12 Gigs file transfer, domain parking, 50 POP3 email accounts, 100 email forward, web- based email, FrontPage 2002 extensions installed, and 24/7 FTP access. This package includes everything I need to host and administer my website. But if I wanted to expand the possibilities, I could add 5 MB extra disk space for $1 per month, 5 POP more email account for $1 per month, 10 email forwarding accounts for $1 per month, domain point for $25 one-time fee, SSL setup for $30 setup fee, MySQL setup at $30, and CGI script installation at $35 an hour. If you really want to have some free hosting, refers your friends to PowWeb, and when they sign up for a one-year package or a two-year package, and put your site down as referral, you'll get 2 months free or 3 months free hosting respectively.

What PowWeb Does Not Offer
PowWeb does not provide internet, telnet or shall access. Nor do they offer dedicated servers or server collocation, anonymous FTP support, Cold Fusion, ASP. Additionally, PowWeb does not provide any ecommerce or shopping cart software, but related software can be installed on their server.

PowWeb Billing
There are two payment plans, either $93.24 for a one-year package, or $186.48 for a two-year package. You cannot pay by month. PowWeb accepts credit cards, checks, money orders, Western Union, and cashiers checks.

Domain Name
My first question was: Who owns the domain name if I wanted to register a domain through PowWeb? Some web hosting services are quite tricky, you register through them, they take all the control. But not with PowWeb, I am the technical and administration contact for my own domain. As well, if I decided to change web hosting service, I can take my domain name with me to somewhere else.

PowWeb also offers to transfer domain names at no cost for their clients to them if the domain names are registered through NSI. Additional domain names cannot be pointed to a main account for a one-time setup charge of $25 per domain.

Note that PowWeb does not offer multiple domain name hosting under one package, therefore they cannot point the second domain name to a different folder in the main account, but to the same index.html page of the main website. As well sub-domains cannot be pointed to a folder in the home directory, although they can be created using DSN.

As of this writing, PowWeb can only initiate domain modification requests for domains ending in .com, .net and .org.

Email
Master mail account is set up automatically setup. Unlimited email aliases is allowed. Email attachments are limited to 5MB. However, attachments or html files cannot be viewed with the web based mail. But incoming emails can be set up to be forward to another email address, or set up the POP account with Netscape Mail 4.5, Eudora Mail, Outlook Express 5, Miscrosoft Outlook 98, or Microsoft Outlook 2000. For outgoing emails, users can use the PowWeb SMTP, and up to 1,000 outgoing emails within a 24 hours period is allowed

Technical Overview
PowWeb uses Dual 866Mhz PIII servers running UNIX-based FreeBSD. Each server has at least 1 Gig of SDRAM. They also run CGI version of PHP version 4.0.5, and Perl version 5.005_03. Perl is what was recommended for writing CGI, but C will work if the CGI scripts are precompiled. PowWeb offers customers access to add, remove or edit A records, CNAME's and MX records , but they don't provide technical support for any DNS modifications. Although there is no limited to the number of MySQL database one can have, only one database will be given by PowWeb, and one user will have full access to that database. Java applets are supported, but not Java servlets.

In Conclusion
I have no idea how big or small a company PowWeb is, but it doesn’t matter, big company is not necessarily good, and small ones are not necessarily bad. All I know is that I have pretty good experience with PowWeb though some problems occurred, but they were not anything that could not be corrected, and PowWeb proved that they did their utmost to make everything right. Their website is clean, professional, and informative. Besides, I like their simple way of doing business, you know exactly what you'll get before hand. For $8.95 a month including web hosting at $7.77 a month, and domain registration at $15 a year, I have a lot of fun! However, one thing I must point out is that PowWeb doesn't seem to have backup server in case a server is down. As long as PowWeb keeps their promised 99.7% uptime, I will continue to be happy.

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Beware of hidden terms that allow providers to shut down your website. - Review by reggiethomson submitted on April 17, 2003
Overall Ratings: 3 out of 10

I have a personal photography website http://www.reggie.net with about 3000 photos of Japan, 700 of Canada and 300 from other countries. It uses my own PHP code and MySQL database.

The website is quite high on the Google search engines, especially in Japan. It now gets about 4 Gbytes of transfer per month, with 160 visitors per day. It was hosted with http://www.thinkhost.com, but cost me over $25 per month for 3 Gbytes transfer, and $15 per Gbyte transfer rate above that. I am unemployed and reggie.net is more of a hobby.

I searched for a web hosting provider that gave good transfer rates for a lower price. Powweb seemed to be the choice - 500 Mbytes space, 30 Gbytes transfer and 99.7% uptime, for $7.77x12 plus $10 (MySQL setup). I noted that there is a limit of 15,000 files per account and that I am currently using about 9,000, so knew that I might have to change providers again in a year or so.

I did a Google check for "powweb problems" and found only one adverse message that seemed to be from someone near the limit of the transfer rate, so discounted it.

It was fairly easy to set up the account and get the database uploaded.

Unfortunately, I didn't watch the website carefully enough during the first month. I noticed once that it was offline for a few hours, though I hadn't been informed of any problems. Near the end of the month, I noticed that my main page looked strange. A MySQL test came up with the error:

ERROR: User 'reggie' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 36000).

I immediately phoned technical services. The person answering was able to tell me what was happening. It seems that there are limits on the MySQL database to prevent one user from taking up too much processing power.

I can appreciate that resources need to be shared evenly between users on the same computer. However, I would like to host with a company that appreciates the importance of website uptime to its owners. It is a trivial matter for a computer to monitor and detect usage of resources. It is also trivially easy to warn by email of any issues arising - preferrably before any drastic action is taken. I would therefore recommend that Powweb makes these adjustments to their resource usage programs. I would also recommend that it makes the limits of usage clear on its terms page.

If you are not using MySQL, or databases, and only have HTML pages, maybe Powweb could be suitable. However, I would still advise caution before setting up a website with them, as I do not know what other reasons they might find for shutting down your website without warning.

Also, the money-back guarantee does not seem to include the $10 for the MySQL set up charges.

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Good Host - by Ed Abbott submitted on April 15, 2003
Overall Ratings: 9 out of 10

Powweb had a lot of downtime in September of 2002. This downtime generated much negative commentary in the reviews here.

I've not noticed significant downtime before or since. The downtime mentioned above was very significant.

My experience at Powweb has been quite good. I particularly like their user forums and their website management interface. The interface is very well thought out.

I've only used the email support but have found the replies I've gotten back to be fast and effective. I've never waited more than a few minutes or hours for a reply.

I've worked with other hosting companies but I find Powweb's interfaces to be the most forward-looking and well thought out.

One thing I do appreciate about Powweb is that they tend to let you do things that could be problematic for them. They seem to take an innocent-until-proven-guilty approch when allowing things that other hosting services might not offer such as cron jobs.

I do get the impression that they are constantly upgrading their service and putting a lot of thought into their business model.

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Take your money elsewhere - Review by menacesan submitted on April 4, 2003
Overall Ratings: 1 out of 10

On 09/30/2002 I decided to find a new host provider for my site (http://www.sphereserver.net). It requires MySQL, PHP, sub-domains and roughly a 1GB transfer per day. After a thorough search of the web using host tools like www.hostsearch.com, I found POWWEB, the self proclaimed "perfect host". Not true. Well their web page sounds really great. They offer full services and 30G transfer per month for cheap. Don't be fooled! As far as I can tell they have no intention of actually honoring that agreement. In my case, one day I found the site not working. After days of trying to contact the admin I finally got the explanation it had been turned off for "resource abuse", not for data transfer but CPU usage. Not so much as an email. In fact it took 4 days before they even responded. The site had been running for over a year on other servers without a hitch.

Evaluation: Read the fine print in the agreement. It turns out they can turn you off and keep your money for ANY reason. (and do) It seems they overloaded their servers. When they discovered this they simply picked the top 2 sites on the server and turned them off. Sounds like good business to me, makes room for more paying customers with less popular sites. They already had my money anyhow. I had foolishly paid for a year in advance. Well hopefully a few people do a search and find this page before going to POWWEB.

(The site was hosted on POWWEB for 2 weeks during which it ran tollerably)

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Complete Incompetence! - Review by Tim Ward submitted on April 2, 2003
Overall Ratings: 2 out of 10

We've been with Powweb for a year and a month. After renewing for another year our site was disabled. I contacted 'tech support' and was told that they had accidentally disabled the account, but that it was now turned back on. A few hours later the site service was back on but our site was gone. When we contacted them about this issue they skirted the issue and avoided the question. Our site was gone with our SQL database and cgi scripts.

It's going to be to much work to put everything back the way it was and we are going to leave. The 'tech support / customer service' has always been horrible and now this gives us a good reason to leave.

My suggestion: If all these bad comments about this company don't lead you to go with someone else... DON'T SIGN UP FOR A YEAR IN ADVANCE. For the time being we'll leave Visa handle them on getting the money back for the year we just paid.

Tim

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Yep, Theyre Pretty Good - Review by FunkyTimes.com submitted on April 1, 2003
Overall Ratings: 10 out of 10

Weve had a very positive experience with Powweb thus far. Running a site which was doing close to 9000 uniques/day at the time I thought Powweb would be a risk, and people warned me against using a budget host but our previous host was terrible so we took the plunge for what we thought would be a "temporary" solution.

Our site was pulled once for a few hours when some unscrupulous spammer decided to use our email as a return address in an attempt to discredit us. I wish we had been consulted before we were pulled but then again, spam is a big issue and Powweb simply demonstrated their non-tolerance of it.

After corresponding with Powweb and explaining the situation they were completely understanding, helpful and they put us back online immediately. They kept in touch with us on the issue and in the end we were able to find the culprit and report him. The problem ended with the spammer being pursued legally. Starr Pierce was the guy I dealt with and he was superb - he even offered to waive some fees if I wanted to switch sites. This was a minor issue in the course of things.

Overall, we have had a very good experience with this company. Better than they claim and the server is FAST. I really cant complain and I dont see how anyone else can. At under $8 you get a service thats worth "at least" twice as much and weve used inferior services in the past that have charged three times as much.

We've been with Powweb for 3 years now and still are. No major problems and so far, so good.

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