POWWEB Good Prices, Advanced Options, Check Your Politics and Attitude
POWWEB Hosting provides hosting solutions with a shop based in California.
They offer decent support and software offerings (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more) at cheap hosting prices. Their primary plans for a 1 or 2 years hosting package with a free domain registration costs $5.77 per month with no setup fees.
*note the cute girl in their advertisement. I’m not pointing that out to be crass, just pointing it out as cute girls seem to be a theme in hosting sales (GoDaddy Superbowl commercial example)
Don’t let the Cute girl distract you from the July sale ($4.77 per month on a hosting plan normally $5.77)
Pros – Price
Those prices are charged a year at a time, so don’t expect to see a $5.77 charge show up every month on your credit card like this is an Audible subscription or something.
Here is what the 1 and 2 year charges will actually look like.
$69.24 for a year is not too bad as far as prices go even cheap prices.
Cons – Support and Complaints
Doing a little research I dug up a review by a blogger that had a nasty run in with POWWEB back in 2005. Long story short, the blog experienced a SQL connection issue (happens all too frequently sometimes – especially with WordPress) and POWWEB tried to shut down the site.
*SQL connection issues can severely drain the resources of a server, which could impact other customers.
Our blogger tried to contact POWWEB and had some trouble getting through, so they through up a splash page on their site and invited their readers to call in to POWWEB. (Kind of gorilla like, but I could envision myself doing that with iPower when they do something stupid next time)
When Customers fight with their Web Host – Everyone Looses
So POWWEB must have gotten slammed and they deleted the blog and all of the blogs posts. Ouch! Definite mean streak.
The blogger moved to a different host and now has a blog article in the top 5 of Google pointing out this lack of customer sensitivity from 2 years back.
Other reviews have mentioned issues with canceling an account. When you cancel a registration or hosting service you need to do it in advance before the renewal takes place otherwise you will get that full 1 or 2 year renewal all over again. This customer claims that they followed the policy and received a credit card charge anyway. So they had to process a chargeback on their credit card for the $37. (I suspect that POWWEB probably paid their employees more than $37 to deal with the credit card merchant services and the customer.
The reason why the customer is always right is really a cost issue. If you try and prove the customer wrong or even do prove the customer wrong, its probably going to cost you more than if you accept that the customer is right, even when they are not.
Overall Perspective
POWWEB seems to offer some affordable rates. They have had a couple nasty customer run ins, but I’ve seen the same type of thing at many other hosting companies. I’d give them a neutral rating as customer service is more important to me than saving a few bucks a year, but if you are looking for cheap rates, this may be a good fit. Maybe you can park some of that money saved on hosting into some cheap Las Vegas Real Estate. Las Vegas has been hot for real estate but the mortage industry shake up is shaking a number of people out of their properties and creating a short term fire sale in Vegas.
Tell us your POWWEB Story
If you have had direct experience with POWWEB hosting, email us your story and we’ll publish your review with a link plug to your website or blog.
Back in June 2005, I signed up for Powweb. I left 3 months later. Not because the service provided was bad, but because I had figured out how to host my web site from home using my DSL connection.
I recently started to search for a web host company, because I’ve decided to stop self-hosting. Because of my “OK” experience with Powweb, they were the “company to beat” in searching for a hosting company. I had asked a reseller question on the forum back in January 2007, and the responses were polite, if not somewhat confusing.
Anyway, over the past month or so, I had been doing a lot of research and monitoring of hosting company forums, trying to decide which one gets my money. During this research, I noticed a disturbing trend on the Powweb forum. The moderators appeared to be overly oppressive when it came to members criticizing Powweb. Because of this, Powweb went from being on the top of my prospects to being completely dropped from consideration.
This past Sunday, I saw a thread on the forum titled “Closing threads that are critical of powweb”. So, I took a look, and it fit right in with what I had already concluded. Trying to provide some constructive criticism to the moderators, I posted to the thread my obervations as a former customer, and that the moderators might want to consider the signal they are sending to potential customers.
This post prompted an arrogant, condescending reply from the moderator “Doc C”. I responded to his post, by calmly trying to explain and defend my post. This post was blocked for over an hour, and was only released after I called Powweb support to file a formal complaint. When it was finally released, I was then attacked by another moderator, “IanS”. I offered another post in defense, and was attacked by IanS again. At this point, it occured to me that this was extremely odd behavior by the moderators, so I stopped posting anything. I was absolutely stunned by what followed. Doc C and IanS made a couple of posts intimating that they, as moderators, were not above inflaming a thread for amusement.
If that wasn’t enough, IanS further tried to taunt me into another post by doing something that I’ve never seen a moderator do on any forum I have ever visited. This moderator posted that the thread would be closed in about 10 hours, so if anyone wanted to make any more comments, do so before then.
I waited until the thread was closed, and on Monday morning I called the Endurance main office. I reaffirmed my desire to follow through on my formal complaint on both Doc C and IanS, letting Endurance CS know, in no uncertain terms, that these moderators are juvenile, unprofessional, and projecting a very negative image for Powweb.
The thread can be found here…
http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?s=22c133493e2bfa975502ef3990c6ccf6&t=75564
Powweb is the most unprofessional web hosting company in existence today. They won’t be around much longer with the image they and their moderators are projecting to the world.
wolleybus
Dear wolleybus,
Thanks for that insight into the forums at PowWeb. I am not familiar with their forum, however I have seen forums owned by businesses (PayPerPost comes to mind) where the moderators do not actually work for the company and actually kind of run with zero to little guidance or oversight.
I wonder if that might be the case with PowWeb. Sometimes companies do not understand the value of a forum and how much a forum can sell their product if used effectively. They sometimes fail to staff it and end up letting customers that are vocal in the forum take charge of things, just because they are there often.
Hi admin…
The Powweb forum moderators aren’t employees. However, Endurance/Powweb management does choose and approve them, the moderators are not self-appointed (according to Endurance CS). So, this makes the moderators representatives of Powweb, which was the original point I tried to make. I mean, I was a relatively satisfied customer 2 years ago, but the heavy-handedness in the forums drove me away this time. So, how can their forum moderation tactics impress a possible first-time customer, especially with all the other technical problems Powweb continues to have.
Ironically, the behavior of the moderators in this experience punctuated exactly the point I was originally trying to point out to them.
Endurance CS did seem to be rather concerned with the direction the moderators took in the thread. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if it changes anything! As for me, my search continues, although I now have my list narrowed to just three (and they all have very friendly-moderated forums).
wolleybus
I have a couple of sites hosted by Powweb, but at the moment, they’re all saying Page Not Found. More worryingly, the main site for support, Powweb.com says Page Not Found!! This has been going on for half an hour now.
Ian,
That type of situation is always certain to increase your blood pressure. I just checked the Powweb.com main site and the support sites and they seemed to be working now. I have seen other hosts that seem to experience a short term down time scenario.
Kind of like a rolling blackout, where maybe the connection or the servers are down for 15-20 minutes. I wonder if this is something you experienced earlier today???
Powweb is awful. All their sites are currently down today. It’s been this way for at least a few hours now. That’s the last straw, I’m moving.