| Plans | Price Per Month |
|---|---|
| PowWeb Hosting | $3.88/month |
| Features | Specifications |
|---|---|
| Min disk space allowed | Unlimited |
| Min Bandwidth Allowed | Unlimited |
| Addon domains | Unlimited |
| Free Domain | yes |
| Free site builder | yes |
| CGI/BIG Access | yes |
| SSI Access | yes |
| FTP Access | yes |
| HTTPS Support | yes |
PowWeb Review
Website: http://www.PowWeb.com
PowWeb has been providing low-cost web hosting since 1999 under the motto “one plan, one price.” Despite their low price tag, they’ve packed quite a lot of value into their single product. Features like load-balancing, security certificates and daily site backups are usually reserved for much more expensive hosting plans, but PowWeb offers those (and others) for as low as $3.88 per month.
PowWeb Highlights
Most web hosts offer unlimited file space, bandwidth, and email accounts, and PowWeb meets the industry’s standard offerings. They also have quite a few unexpected features that aren’t part of the usual hosting agreement.
Load-Balanced Hosting on a Tight Budget -”Load balancing” – the process of sharing workloads between 2 or more computer servers – is a technology usually offered on high-end, expensive hosting plans. It requires special hardware (a “load balancer”), as well as a savvy staff that knows how to support and monitor it. Websites benefit greatly from this technology, becoming faster, more stable, and almost completely crashproof. I doubt you’ll find load balancing anywhere else for less money.
Daily Website and Database Backups – While quite a lot of web hosts offer data backups, they often charge for it, or roll the cost into your monthly rate. They also might do it much less often than daily. PowWeb somehow offers backups of both site files and databases daily for under $4 per month, which is certainly impressive. The bigger your website is, the more valuable this service becomes.
Support for Dreamweaver and Frontpage – If you have expensive software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, PowWeb will fit very well with your existing technology. It would be a shame to have fancy software sitting on the shelf because your hosting provider doesn’t “play nice” with it. So, if you work primarily in one of these two programs, PowWeb should be on your shortlist of ideal web hosts.
Free Domain Registration – Many hosts throw in a lot of frivolous perks that aren’t really necessities, but PowWeb offers real value in their freebies. Everyone needs a domain name, and PowWeb waives the usual registration fee for new customers. Because you almost certainly would have purchased it elsewhere, this perk offers real savings.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee – Having to commit to a year upfront can make any webmaster or business owner nervous, but PowWeb’s money-back guarantee gives you plenty of time to back out of the agreement if you’re truly unhappy with their hosting. Instead of paying a higher rate on a month-to-month basis, you can confidently commit to a full year with this guarantee in mind.
PowWeb Weaknesses
While PowWeb fulfills all their promises and meets all expectations, they do have a few noteworthy weaknesses worth mentioning.
Only One Plan, Only One Price – Although “one plan, one price” is a selling point for PowWeb, some customers might want more than one choice. Websites evolve, and their hosting needs can often change. It would be comforting to know that there are stronger hosting products if your website becomes a smashing success.
Year-Long Commitment for the Best Value – While PowWeb’s prices are very impressive, they’re all based on a minimum commitment of one year. Quite a few similar hosts offer the same kind of bulk discount, and unlike PowWeb, some of them allow you pay month-to-month (at a slightly higher rate) if you wish.
Limit of 75 MySQL Databases – Although very few customers would ever exceed the limitation of 75 MySQL databases, Hosts regularly offer them on an unlimited basis. I’m not sure why PowWeb is reluctant to do the same, but it might mean that their systems are a little “crowded” with customers, or that they generally don’t want to support large, complex web apps. Regardless of the reasoning, it’s not a good thing to offer less than the competition.
Email Account Activity - According to their user agreement, PowWeb can delete unused email accounts after 90 days which has caught out some customers by surprise.
No News is Bad News – Although they have an active community on their forums, PowWeb hasn’t issued a press release since 2005, and they haven’t posted on their company blog since mid-2008. That’s quite a few years since PowWeb’s last activity, leaving the customer wondering “What else have they neglected for so many years?” Hopefully not their server systems!
PowWeb Uptime and Reliability
Since March of 2006, PowWeb has been up 99.84% of the time. Some customers do complain about short outages, or server slowness, likely due to the volume of customers that they need to put on a server in order to offer such low price points.
Conclusion
PowWeb offers more bang for your buck than almost any other host. Theyve squeezed a surprising amount of features into a small price tag, and they’ve carefully shaped their product to offer maximum value. They also have a decade of experience under their belt and a large, active community of customers. However, judging from the reviews around the web, customers have been known to run into unresponsive customer service (which is outside of North America) as a result of the volume of customers that PowWeb has attracted to their service.
But, if you’d like to buy more than $4 per month of web hosting, they don’t have a “premium plan” or any other product. Also, there are a few clues (database limitations, inactive blog, 5+ years of no press releases) suggesting that hammering their price tag to rock-bottom levels does come at a cost.
If you’re working with an extremely tight budget, PowWeb is an excellent choice, but, if you can afford even $2-3 more dollars per month, you might want to consider hosts that are offering more instead of charging less.
* Click here to sign-up at PowWeb and get a free Yellowpages.com listing, $75 in Google AdWords vouchers, $50 Facebook advertising credit, and $25 to spend on Yahoo/Bing marketing.
PowWeb Customer Quotes
“For the price I really don’t think there is a better shared hosting provider. Now that’s not to say that they are perfect by any means. I have noticed some slowness with some of my pages loading.”
“I’m done with these guys, my suggestion to anyone considering them: find someone else! The anxiety (and extra work involved) of serving your clients through these guys isn’t worth the money. You’ll spend more later so go pay the extra up front somewhere else.”
“It’s just gotten worse over time, and, there are far better hosts out there.”
“Powweb’s support for MySQL is awful. I have a simple SMF forum and it’s down most of the time with connection errors.”
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