It's just terrible, no support, terrible performance, on phone few times i got somebody who don't speak english.
I just payed for one more year, they told me month ago that everything will be fixed, but... feel like idiot now.
Be aware!

I have 4 websites in one industry so I have been able to ride powwebs down time outages. There are entire afternoons where my site is down. This applies especially in the summer. I have read articles that there equipment has been and still is obsolete. I can only attest that there outages over the 3 year period give credence to this. I think now is the time for me to switch and I am planning on transferring tomorrow.

Until they were bought out last year, I used to swear by this company. They were awesome. Great uptime and performance. I ran into a few technical issues that cost me a lot of customers due to their transfer. But I lived with it.

I now have daily issues starting around 7:30 in the morning until after 9:00 at night every day for 2.5 weeks. I can sometimes get to my site, but when I do it is very slow. Frequently I get server resets, page can not be displayed and many other issues causing my pages not to be displayed at all.

I've been in daily contact with their support to which it gets set up to a level 2 technician who sends back a response saying you may be a little slower during peak times. Taking over 2 minutes to load in which normally takes less then 10 seconds is not a little slower. And most of the time I can't get to the pages at all. But if I visit my website really late at night during the week days, it's perfect and super fast. And that's when they like to look at it and dismiss my complaint to start all over again the next day.

If you choose to try them out, I wish you the best of luck for they used to be an awesome company. Not worth the price or the headache.

Powweb started off OK, but has steadily decreased in performance since the beginning of the year.

This is obviously due to their aggressive pricing and marketing leading to a serious overselling situation.

Stay away from Powweb, they have really let customer service go out the door.
Expect (consistently 1/2 waits) to reach them.
They made changes to catch-all email forwarding - when calling them on it, (because they never informed me of the change) they blamed me.

bottom line - stay away!!!

I left my other hosting company tera-byte because of all the things powweb was offering. I had consistant downtime with my first site but made the terrible mistake of thinking it was do to using MySql to run my entire site and their lack of keeping their sql servers running smoothly. So when I needed a second site and knew I would'nt be relying heavily on MySql I went ahead and signed up with them again.

Well, now I know it is all their servers that suffer from endless up and downtimes. One account is on their www2 server and another on their www3 server. Both experience endless slow periods.

When I finally had enough... I documented my downtimes over a few days and went to their forums to ask what is wrong with their servers and what they are going to do about it. First off, they have a announcement section, but NEVER report anything but major outtages that last days. So if your server is going up and down for 2 weeks they wont even mention it. Thus leaving you with the only choice of asking them in their forums what is going on.

I would check the server address and NOT my website address to ensure that it was the server that was running slow and not just my site. I wrote saying that their server (which was only a blank page with the name of the server) would take up to 2 minutes to load at times and this was unacceptable. I told them I shouldn't be the one monitoring your servers for uptime and that if your servers are having problems you should tell your customers about it and not the other way around. I asked for a explanation as to why these problems weren't in their announcements section.

After a few forum trolls blasted me with everything from I must not know how to make a website, I need to clear my cache to your so dumb for not telling us your address so we can check it ourselves (Even though I clearly stated I was checking the server not my website for downtime). Anyway, a employee finally answered me and in a very condensending tone explained that a user had been running bad scripts on the server for a week and his account was deleted. He then went on to call me a liar about my website on www2 having any problems and I must just be making that up. He then promptly closed the thread. I came back the next day to read this and didn't even get the chance to respond. It was rude and completely unneccasary. BTW, my problems cleared up for awhile on my www3 account but are now back again and plague my www2 account as well. I do not enjoy jumping around companies but they have forced me start looking for a new webhost when my accounts run out.

P.S. Here is how a professional company should have responded,

Dear customer we are so sorry for the inconvenience. We will work harder in the future to inform our valued customers of intermittant problems with our servers. We will look into the www2 server and make sure absolutely nothing is happening there. Once again we apologize for your inconvenience and hope to continue doing business with you in the future. LOL, good luck hearing that from Powweb.

very good support & site is always up & running

While their "uptime" may be close to the 99.7% that they claim, this does not take into account the incredible number of very slow server times.

And when their server grinds to a virtual halt, they never have any record of it, will not confirm it. So you're told that nothing is wrong and to stop bothering them.

Forget running a message board on PowWeb. They offer the MySQL database free with hosting. But contrary to massive amounts of confirmation, they continue to run MySQL version 4, which is well known to constantly corrupt tables. While the better web hosts have reverted back to MySQL version 3 (far more stable) until the problem is solved, PowWeb doesn't want anyone bothering them about it.

And if stable, effective email is of any concern, PowWeb will most certainly become the bane of your site's existance. In the 1.5 years I've had multiple sites hosted there, the email system has NEVER worked in even the most rudimentary fasion. Forget sending email reponses, as they never reach the recipients.

PowWeb is cheap at only $7.77 per month. You get 650Mb of storage space and 45Gb of bandwidth.

PowWeb's public forums for members seem like a great and helpful way to get quick responses to questions or problems ??
Think again.
The staff which operates on the forums are NOT the support staff of PowWeb. In short, this means that those on the forums can only guess that problems are truly being looked into.

But you get even less than what you pay for at PowWeb.

1. email never works properly
2. email spam filtering is weak and they openly refuse to improve it.
3. 200+ Mb mandatory log files on your site.
4. MySQL is a dead fish]
5. message boards can't work properly.
6. Often rude, snide and overly simplistic responses from the staff.
7. 99.7% of the time, it's all YOUR fault that an operational problem exists, NOT PowWeb's.


Bottom line...
Unless you are a truly advanced WebMaster who can somehow circumvent the great myriad of problems at PowWeb, you'd be wise to spend just a little bit more money on a web host that actually works for you.