PowWeb specializes in shared hosting for websites with small to medium levels of traffic.
With simple pricing and advanced technology, PowWeb offers a decent hosting solution for beginners or intermediate site owners and bloggers.
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PowWeb was pretty popular back in 2006.
Here is how they’ve trended over the years:
Features
PowWeb isn’t your typical hosting company.
Here are some of the unique features they have to offer:
1) Only One Plan: PowWeb is different from most web hosting companies in that they only offer one plan. “One Plan, One Price,” is their operating slogan. This eliminates the confusion that inevitably comes with different pricing structures. You don’t have to wonder about which plan is more suitable for you. But just because they only offer one plan doesn’t mean they lack essentials.
Their plan comes with all the standard features, including unlimited storage, unlimited (scalable) bandwidth, FTP access, web-based file manager, control panel, and more. They also allow more advanced technology such as PHP, Perl, MySQL databases, ecommerce functionalities, etc.
2) Interactive Forums: PowWeb’s community forum boasts over 11,000 registered users (not quite on GoDaddy or BlueHost‘s level). With over 100 active users online at any given time, any question that the support staff can’t quickly answer is highly likely to be answered by forum users. The forum is also the first place to check for system outages or company announcements.
Forum topics range from general issues to any technology allowed by PowWeb, including PHP, MySQL, Perl, domain names, script installers, etc. With thousands of question and answer strands available for you to look through you are sure to find any information you are looking for quickly.
3) Load-Balanced Technology: PowWeb uses proprietary load-balancing hosting technology, similar to what large corporations use to support their critical websites. This simply means that there are multiple paths to access your website, known as “redundancy.”
PowWeb balances a single website on multiple servers, so even if one server fails, your website is guaranteed to stay up. When there are multiple entry points to a single website, this ensures your website is up most of the time. This is perfect if you are running a eCommerce store and need to ensure your site stays up and running so you don’t lose customers or money.
Customer Support
When it comes to support at PowWeb, they offer live chat 24/7 along with a support ticketing system and a phone number for US customers.
They offer pretty straightforward and simple hosting plans so most of their customers probably never need support anyways (customer support can get pretty complex as you move up into issues dealing with VPS and dedicated servers).
Reviews
We have searched the internet looking over PowWeb reviews. The positives of this hosting company that customers enjoy are price and uptime.
One customer simply states: “Our websites have pretty well 100% uptime, they are good value for money.”
Another happy reviewer raves: “Virtually no down time. I cannot recall an instance of downtime with any of the sites they host for me in the 5 years I have been a customer.”
We also found some negative reviews however. It seems most customers here were disappointed with PowWeb’s tech support and wait times.
One reviewer stated that: “Support is terrible, sure you can chat with someone – but that person will always pass it on and you will get an answer in a day or two.”
Another customer agrees saying: “The average response time to a support query has gone from less than an hour to more than four hours, the support staff are not anything like as good as they were.”
Pros
1) Marketing Tools: While $100 doesn’t sound like a lot, every bit helps when it comes to spending money on Google AdWords or Yahoo/Bing Sponsored Search. Plus, if you’re not yet serious about aggressively marketing your website or know nothing about online advertising, $100 provides a good starting point to learn the ropes.
2) Scalable Bandwidth: No website hosting plan offers true “unlimited” bandwidth because this opens too many doors for abuse. PowWeb is no exception, but they still offer unlimited bandwidth provided you stay within reasonable limits.
3) Daily Backup: Backing up your website is crucial but doing so manually can be a pain. PowWeb offers SnapShot instant click that restores daily backups in a few seconds.
4) Price: For prepay options, PowWeb offers very reasonable prices at $4.18/month for 1-year, $3.88/month for 2-year and 3-year plans. These are some of the best prices you’ll find for web hosting plans online.
5) Scripts: PowWeb doesn’t offer Fantastico, a commercial script library that automates most of the popular script installations, but they do offer 25 automated script installers. These include Joomla, WordPress, image galleries, chats, web calendars, and ecommerce carts among others.
6) Good Support: PowWeb has toll-free phone support, email support, 24-hour live chat support, and a myriad of tutorials and support documentations. There is also a support forum where other users answer questions.
7) Generous Referral Fees: PowWeb pays $77.77 for every referral through their affiliate program, and $35 credit for a simple tell-a-friend referral.
Cons
1) Tight Cancellation Policy: PowWeb has a 30-day cancellation policy, which isn’t too bad but a bit short compared to other companies that offer 60 or even 90-day guarantees. To cancel outside the initial 30-day term, you’ll owe $35 cancellation fee. You’ll also have to give at least one-month notice for cancellation.
2) Shared Hosting Only: PowWeb only offers unlimited shared hosting. So if your website has massive bandwidth needs, you would do well to find a company that offers a dedicated hosting plan.
3) No Migration Service: If you are migrating from other hosting plans, PowWeb doesn’t offer migration services to make the process easier. But their support system should negate this factor.
Summary
PowWeb is your standard web hosting company that offers incredibly good prices for multi-year plans.
While there is no advanced extras like WordPress hosting or dedicated servers, their plans are perfectly suitable for someone running a simple website, blog, or small ecommerce store. Signup bonuses for Yahoo sponsored search and Google AdWords is another perk. Their proprietary load-balanced technology ensures your website’s uptime is high. They have multiple support avenues that should help resolve any issues.
PowWeb got rid of the their community forums years ago. They didn’t want to support it, and they didn’t like powweb customers communicating with one another.