PowWeb Introduction
PowWeb was founded in 1999, but like many similar companies, it has now been acquired by the Endurance International Group - the same company that run iPage, iPower and many other shared web hosting companies. According to the PowWeb Migration website, the acquisition appears to have taken place in early 2006.
Currently the company offers one shared hosting plan and appears to be US-based. Much of the site is very similar in look and feel to other EIG-owned hosting company sites, with small businesses and individuals being their primary target market. Pricing is competitive, with a couple of caveats.
PowWeb Hosting Plans
The only web hosting plan PowWeb offers is a simple unlimited shared hosting plan on the company’s Linux server farm. According to old company help documentation, they once used RedHat, but it’s not clear if this is still the case.
The plan includes a free domain name with the ability to host unlimited domains, plus support for MySQL, PHP, SSL, CGI and more features. All are fairly standard at this price point.
No advanced products, such as VPS or dedicated hosting, appear to be offered via the PowWeb site. The company does provide hosted Exchange email and some other bolt-on tools which I’ll run through in the Extras section.
PowWeb Uptime/Downtime
PowWeb don’t mention any uptime guarantees, which is fairly typical for hosts owned by this group. There’s no data about their uptime history on the site either.
According to the ageing migration website, the company’s data centre is located in Waltham, MA in the US. That may not be the case now, though. Other than that, there’s not a lot of information to go on. The site states that PowWeb use Tier 1 backbones and clustered RAID technology together with Dell servers.
PowWeb Support
The PowWeb forums are used to communicate announcements and provide user-to-user support. These forums are active, but staff announcements are rare, with the most recent pinned post dating from 2006. Staff appear to post every three to four months in the announcements section.
The support portal is identical to many other Endurance International Group web hosting companies’ support pages. Fairly good documentation is provided for users to help themselves, and this is presented with a link through to the support ticket system and a 24/7 live chat tool. Just like their sibling host, iPower, PowWeb offers a US toll-free support number; this number is the same regardless of the country you choose from the site drop-down list, and there’s no international alternative given.
PowWeb in the News
Other than anecdotal blog posts and forum discussions, there’s no big news in the archives that relates to PowWeb. The service appears to be free of any major billing or availability scandals.
PowWeb Control Panel
There’s no mention of Cpanel or Plesk on the PowWeb website. It appears that the company offers a custom control panel, vDeck. Again, this is a common feature offered by its sibling companies. Although vDeck is capable enough, it’s not as user-friendly or attractive as some other solutions.
PowWeb Extras
New PoweWeb users receive a free domain name, plus Google, Yahoo!/Bing and Facebook advertising credits. The company offers a generous referral programme for clients. For less experienced website owners, PowWeb also offers an easy-to-use site builder tool to get a website up and running as quickly as possible.
In terms of free applications, PowWeb offer around 25 scripts which can be installed from the user control panel. These scripts include Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, osCommerce and various guestbook, chat and gallery tools.
PowWeb Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy
PowWeb’s money back guarantee is limited to 30 days. If you cancel outside of this initial 30-day term, you’ll be hit with a cancellation fee of at least $35, and you’ll also need to give a month’s notice to end your agreement. Note that the 30-day guarantee only applies to customers who pay via credit card.
PowWeb Summary
PowWeb are a fairly standard web host with one fairly standard package, and many of the features and terms are interchangeable with other hosting companies owned by EIG. The lack of an international contact number is a negative, but the one thing PowWeb have in their favour is the amount of information left over from before the migration when the company was taken over. Some of this is out of date, but there’s still quite a lot of documentation to be found if you dig deep enough. Whether it’s still relevant or not is another matter. Note when signing up that the price they advertise only applies for the initial contract term. If you want to lock in the saving, you’ll need to commit to a two-year contract.
I have used powweb since 2004 and up until the last 2 years their service has been satisfactory at best. If you are looking for a space to host a static site and you are not worried about page load times or if you don't plan on using up more than 20 GB of disk space, you should be okay. Lets get some things clear:
They DO NOT offer unlimited disk space. (After you hit 25GB they threaten to suspend your account)
They DO NOT offer unlimited bandwidth.(After you hit 7GB they threaten to suspend your account)
Their mysql databases are mediocre at best and only offer a meager amount of simultaneous connections. (So do not use powweb for forum hosting)
No mysql external connections.
Their support is nonexistent.
They will shut all the domains on your account down for no reason just to get you to call in and try to up sell you to premium support and/or cross sell you to site lock.
They auto-renew your account for over $200.00 even after you turn off auto renew then refuse to give you refund.
I would suggest doing research first before going with powweb because once you have a few domains and databases with them, they do whatever they can to trap you with them. RUN!!