PowWeb | The Perfect Hosting Solution

PowWeb has been around since 1999 and their service has been both cursed and praised ever since. At TopTenReviews we have used a variety of hosting companies for our different sites, and PowWeb service for us falls into the middle range. Some of the things that make PowWeb less attractive: occasional downtime, fewer features, and inconsistent support.

Feature Set:

PowWeb offers a plan for $7.77 per month (prepaid annually). This plan includes 20,000 MB of disk storage, 650 email addresses and 400 GB of data transfer per month. PowWeb does have some limitations-they do not support email auto responders, a common feature offered by other hosting companies. Also, password protection directories in PowWeb need to be configured manually, which is difficult for a novice. They also have a limit on the maximum number of files you can store. Even though the limit is high-25,000-this is an unusual restriction. This host offers a free shopping cart, but the cart is a poor quality one.

PowWeb supports the following software: FrontPage, PHP4, Perl5, Sendmail CGI-BIN, SSI, .htaccess, Cronjobs, Flash, Shockwave, Midi, Mulitmedia Support, MySQL databases and phpmyadmin databases.
Customer Service:

PowWeb offers a few support options, such as email, live-chat and toll-free telephone support. The toll-free line is available Monday to Friday 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. PDT and Saturday to Sunday 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. PDT. Technicians we spoke to were not always able to resolve our concerns right away.

PowWeb also offers online tutorials and a FAQ (frequently asked questions) section on their website. If you are new to web hosting, these tutorials and FAQs are quite helpful when setting up your site and other tasks. PowWeb also provides an online community forum where most of your e-mail questions will be answered, and a negative e-mail response will be available for everyone to see.
Control Panel:

PowWeb’s control panel, called the Member Operations Center, is of their own design. The six main functions on the panel include Main, personal, accounting, packages, domreg and history. The main tab provides you access to FAQs, submits questions to support, sales, or billing staff. The personal tab allows you to view or edit your personal information as well as add new user accounts. The accounting tab lets you create billing accounts, view online payments, add payment methods, and view account history. The package tab is where you will configure the meat of your hosting service-you can configure pop3 accounts, smtp, ftp, http, domains, MySQL, and SSL. The DomReg tab is where you register your domain names. The final tab is your history tab, which logs all the changes you make to your account.

Summary:

Overall, PowWeb is a moderate hosting company. Our number 1 ranked product, Globat for instance, is available for $7.77 and has, by far, more features and better support.