PowWeb Web Hosting Review

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Features:
Reliability:
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IP Address	Service	Status	Response Time	Last Monitored
65.254.250.20	HTTP		0.125 secs	05-13-2008 22:20:00pm
65.254.250.20	HTTP		0.159 secs	05-13-2008 22:10:00pm
65.254.250.20	HTTP		0.124 secs	05-13-2008 22:00:01pm
65.254.250.20	HTTP		0.162 secs	05-13-2008 21:50:00pm

PowWeb.com Profile and Background

Since 1999 Powweb has been offering low cost web hosting services for both individuals and small businesses. Its corporate office is located in Monterey Park, CA. The company’s network operations center is situated in the Garland Building in Downtown Los Angeles.

The NOC facility utilizes BGP4 routing and is multi-homed to Tier 1 backbone providers. Verio and Internap provides 2 gigabyte feeds to Powweb.

Powweb are different to most other major web hosting companies in that they offer one single web hosting plan to consumers. Under these circumstances, it may be difficult for buyers to upgrade to more advanced packages later on but it also allows Powweb to focus their energy and resources on their core strengths: affordable web hosting for small to medium size businesses.

Signup Process

After we noised around their community forum, we decided to finally sign up with their web hosting services at the cost of $7.77/month. The signup process was lengthy process that spanned over 3 pages but we encountered no problems with providing both contact and payment details.

We purchased the package on a annual term so we received two months free and also a free domain name. The transaction was achieved over a secure socket layer (SSL) connection.

After our payment was processed, we were soon able to log into our accounts.

Value for Money

The so called “Super Web Hosting Deal” consisted of 5000MB of disk space, 10GB daily data transfer allowance, and 650 e-mail accounts. The 10GB daily allowance works out to be approximately 300GB/month average. All domains are hosted on web servers powered by high-end Dell 1750 and 2650 PowerEdge servers for data redundancy and enhanced reliability. Thus, this is excellent value, and should satisfy those customers who host a lot of multimedia and other large files.

The control panel employed by Powweb is a proprietary control panel called OPS that allows the end-user to self-manage their own web hosting accounts. It contains the standard management features but cannot match those offered by H-Sphere or CPanel. It did not have any pre-installed scripts options, integrated web site builder tool, or the graphical user interface richness of other control panel automation software.

Customer Support

Powwed offers an array of support options to its web hosting clients including live chat, support ticketing system, toll free phone line and its community forum. We tested the response times of the first three customer support options, and found them to be above average. The live chat responded right away and we asked a few questions regarding the OPS control panel. The answers we received were prompt and referred us to the tutorials on the web site. Secondly, the toll free phone lines seemed responsive and we were put through to a customer support representative after waiting for about 30 seconds. It also should be noted that the phones lines are opened only between certain hours seven days a week. Lastly, the support ticket we sent took approximately three and a half hours to reply.

If you signed up and find their support lacking, which we didn’t, they do have a 100% satisfaction policy and offer a 30 day money back guarantee.

Network Reliability and Performance

Over the two month monitoring period, we only detected about 5-10 minutes of downtime. Compared to the other major web hosting companies, this is an excellent result, particularly, with such a fast growing web hosting company. Internally, Powweb’s network adopts a clustering technology architecture where they spread their web services over multiple dedicated machines. Meaning, if one server goes down, other servers would be available to handle the extra load, avoiding any downtime for our customers

Final Words

Although Powweb has only limited web hosting service offerings, we can say that they are certainly good at what they do. Its flagship product is very generous, especially in its bandwidth allowances, and their customer support proves to be more than satisfactory. Areas where it can improve on is its web control panel and offer more than one web hosting plan in the future. As they say, one size doesn’t necessarily fit all. However, Powweb is no featherweight either!

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