PowWeb Review

PowWeb Editor's Review

PowWeb was founded in 1999 and features load balanced web hosting that they say delivers pages from a farm of computers rather than from a single server. As quoted from PowWeb:

PowWeb's hosting solution offers complete true, redundancy from point A to point B. There are multiple paths for your visitor to access your website at every given point. We distribute the load of a single website across multiple physical servers. If one server goes down, there is no noticeable effect on end users and no downtime.

PowWeb is an unlimited hosting provider that provides unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited hosted domains under a single shared web hosting plan. PowWeb currently offers $125 worth of free advertising credits from Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

PowWeb includes a 30-day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with their web hosting after your first month.

Editor's Comments About PowWeb Price Value

PowWeb offers an excellent introductory rate that is very competitive and is priced below average compared to other web hosting providers. PowWeb provides a single web hosting account that is meant to be a one-size-fits-all plan.

Editor's Comments About PowWeb Reliability

PowWeb over the years has not been known to be the most reliable web hosting provider. In fact, even today, we've seen many complaints regarding PowWeb outages. However, since the beginning of 2010, there hasn't been many new complaints about PowWeb and a quick review of their community forum indicates things might be improving since their outage issues related to DNS problems.

Editor's Comments About PowWeb Control Panel

PowWeb utilizes VDeck 4.0 as their control panel. VDeck 4.0 is the latest vDeck that offers easy access to website management, domain management, and Ecommerce services. vDeck is nowhere near as popular as other web hosting management platforms, and is considered by customer hosting reviews as a standard basic control panel that allows the web hosts that use it to reduce costs.

Editor's Comments About PowWeb Customer Support

During our review of PowWeb we created a live chat session and had to wait 3 minutes for an agent to take our question. When our question was finally asked, we were responded with odd questions and invalid answers. Here is the chat log:

Paul Kim: Hi Scott. My name is Paul, how are you today?
Scott: What control panel? vDeck?
Paul Kim: May I have the URL of our Web site through which you have logged into this chat? I need the URL of our Web site where you have clicked the Chat icon.
Scott: PowWeb
Paul Kim: Okay. Paul Kim: We are having control panel powered by cDexk4..
Scott: cDexk4 doesnt exist. Did you mean vDeck4?
Paul Kim: Sorry. It should be vDeck4.
Scott: Ok thank you.

We find it very strange that they need to ask what URL that we are asking our question from. PowWeb's live chat feels outsourced and based on the dialog, the representative doesn't appear to speak English natively, suggesting the support is not from North America. This is illustrated by the response "We are having control panel powered by."

PowWeb offers live chat, a knowledgebase, video tutorials (outdated), an email ticket system, and a community forum. PowWeb also provides 24/7 telephone support via a toll free number for both sales and technical support.