Web Hosting user reviews for Powweb

02/17/2004 - rating: 10 - by: Jeff Hojnacki
I have been with PowWeb for years now and they have been an excellent host. Countless times they have improved their service and hosting package for existing users for free. PowWeb has great servers, equipment, and Internet connection for an extremely high level of speed and reliability with downtime (not caused by upgrades) very rare. Support and the community forum are great. Not many hosts have their own forum to allow customers (and potential customers) to help each other out, but I don't see why not--if you're having a problem you can get an answer in literally minutes. Try out PowWeb, you should like them as much as I have. And if you don't, they have a 30 day money back guarantee.

02/17/2004 - rating: 1 - by: Joe
It's quite possible that powweb was a great host at one time, but if this was even true it has definately changed. 1. Their forums. Guess what, they delete any and all posts with complaints or upset customers. 2. If you ask them if they deleted posts they will deny it and make pathetic excuses. 3. There staff monitor their forums and tell you that they are not staff but simply customers who just happen to LOVE powweb so much that they spend all there freetime monitoring forums. 4. If something goes wrong with your server or anything on your account THEY DO NOT email you. The only place to get this information is in there announcements section of their forum. Be prepared to spend many days logging into their foums. 5. If you experience a legitimate problem with powweb the moderaters on the forum will first tell you to waste time doing trace routes, pings and other useless things. They spend countless time trying to convince people that the problem must be on some anonymous router somewhere between you and powweb. 6. If you email tech support about your server going up and down for a night you will get a auto-reply saying there is nothing wrong with their server and it must be something you are doing. 8. Your files are on a http server, your ftp on a ftp server, your mysql on a mysql server, email on a smtp server. At various times, sql servers are the worst, these servers continually go down. Any link in the chain will ruin your website. Be forwarned if you want your site to depend on mysql, such as a phpnuke portal or have phpbb forums. 9. If you think your safe having a file forum instead of a mysql based, be also forwarned. They have consistant problems with file count and I see numerous people begging to have their websites turned back on because powweb has shut down their website for exceeding the file limit. Example 1, On October 3rd, 2003, a email sent from a hacker originating from billing@powweb showed users partial credit card information and asked the user to log in and update their credit card information. I immediatelly emailed billing@powweb asking what this was all about. I forgot all about it. 3 days later I go to powweb announcements. It turned out a hacker had hacked powweb accounts and had peoples credit card information. I immediatelly emailed billing@powweb and support@powweb. The forum was filled with furious people. 2 days later (5 total since this started) I recieve a email back from billing. The day before I recieve my email back from powweb a forum moderator closes a thread about the credit card problem and tells us that the forums are not the place to discuss this and we should contact billing. The next day they deleted every thread about the entire incident. Many powweb customers who don't use the forums have no idea the entire incident ever happened. Or that a hacker could have their credit card information. The only trace of the entire incident is a short little post in the announements section of the forum with almost no information. A person soon after started a thread asking powweb to email customers in the future about such things. The thread was deleted. Example 2, Almost all of powwebs websites went down for 12 hours. Customers were furious and again flooded the message board with posts. After the servers came back up a short message in the announcements section said they were having problems with http. About a half-hour later they posted another message saying all problems were fixed. They then promptly deleted every message in the forums even remotely related to this. When I asked, a moderator told me that the threads were merged and that NOTHING was deleted. I asked for her to give me a link to even 1 thread about the incident. She didn't reply and my thread was deleted a little later on. Once again, many users who weren't online that day have no idea about the 12 hour outtage and from reading the announcements think it only lasted a half hour. I have many more, but I think i've said enough.

02/17/2004 - rating: 1 - by: David
PowWeb are useless. I have just ended my 1 year contract with them 6 months early (ie. I'll lose 6 months worth of fees, but it'll be worth it to get away from them.) In a nutshell, I can't even recall the number of times that my site has been unavailable because of some "technical difficulty" at their end - it's simply too many to count. Their support (and I don't necessarily blame the people themselves for everything, but rather poor training) is appalling, ranging from down-right rude, to unhelpful, to unknowledgable, to slow in the extreme and extremely inadequate. Their hosting is cheap - and you simply get what you pay for, which is a bunch of seemingly good feautures - but you will quickly become dissapointed if you choose to host with Pow Web. They don't give a darn about their customers, and appear to give even less of a darn about how many times, and how long their servers are down for. If you only occasionally check your web site, and don't mind it being down (or at a minimum have FTP or MySQL unavailable) for about 5% - 10% of the time, then maybe you can stand their poor service, and don't mind supporting them. But if you're more than semi-serious about having a nice, reliable web site then definitely go elsewhere. PowWeb is not worth the money, not worth the hassle, and not worth wasting your efforts on.

02/17/2004 - rating: 1 - by: Rudy
Folks, this guy who just gave them a "10" clearly does not host his website with POWWEB or works for them. If there was a 0, that's what they would get from me. Now it's Christmas-sales-season and our website has been down for days. Suddenly $7.77 pm does not seem like such a bargain as our lost sales may well have easily paid for a much better and more reliable Host. My Posts indicating a problem (in their forum) were deleted - even though I was very kind to them (I will not make that mistake again). Ever heard of "The People of the lie"? What they really need is to charge $6.66 pm since that would more accurately represent them. Take my advise ... spend your money and your efforts elsewhere.

02/17/2004 - rating: 7 - by: Steve
I've used Powweb for a couple of years, and overall have been very satisfied with their products and service. Admittedly, none of my sites (I have six websites, which are redirected to two Powweb packages) are high volume, none are overly complex, and none are mission critical. My experience is that they have been helpful, and when some part of their system goes down (webmail, pop3mail, a website, MySQL) they are quick to post a notice on their bulletin board, and prompt to fix the problem. For $7.77 per month, I can tolerate my website not working for five minutes in two months. Such downtime is very rare in my experience. When I have had serious problems with my websites, it's been my own fault. Php, MySQL, Perl, and other things you simply can't get on AOL have a steep learning curve! Fortunately, the Powweb forums usually provide an answer to such mistakes. My only real reservation is that all of their equipment is located in Los Angeles, not far from the San Andreas fault. When The Big One comes, I'm in trouble.

12/13/2004 - rating: 4 - by: T. Burke
I used them for years, but found that not being able to call on the telephone during mission critical issues and having to rely on 24-48 hour turnarounds in emails from tech support to be unacceptable to my clients. Their support and payment configuration was good, no problems with their service as a basic provider, but I needed more.... :|

01/23/2005 - rating: 1 - by: Thomas Tokstad
Cheap hosting means nothing if your site is down, which mine has been all day. Now its friday nite i wonder if it will be down all weekend.