It is unusual for me to use a service without first asking around, or if nobody has introduced it to me. However, when I was very frustrated with Homestead, I stumbled into PowWeb and found this down-to-earth service, which seemed interesting me. PowWeb hosting is inexpensive, if it didn't perform as well as I hoped, I wouldn't have a lot to lose. So, I signed up and used their subsidiary site to register my domain. It has been a few months now.

The registration of a domain went very smoothly, the availability and a construction page was up within 24 hours like the normal standard. As for web hosting, so far I have made three complaints, and all three times I got satisfactory answers from PowWeb, and the problems were resolved within 12 hours or less. These problems included: (1) Somebody tried to run script on the server for my site that caused a complete shut down of the server. (2) PowWeb had a hardware problem. (3) I detected a slowness when I tried to FTP new pages to the server some day ago, while it usually takes about 5 minutes to upload my 60 pages. PowWeb's explanation was that they were having some trouble with SprintNet, who is one of their backbone providers. But they have additional bandwidth on order from both Verizon and Pbi.net.

Good Customer/Technical Support
By no means I'm a patient person, so when there was a problem, I would first send an email, and followed by a phone call. Although I didn't have any luck with their toll-free number, reaching a person at PowWeb by calling their technical support worked out fine. They explained to me what the problems were, and answered each and every question with a solution. As well, they also replied to all my emails. Last but not the least, they gave me a month's credit for causing the inconvenience. No, this is not a biggie, but I appreciate the fact that they cared about their customers. And it seems that they provide what they promise, and strive to do the best they can.

PowWeb Deal
Their "One Plan, One Price" pure web hosting service comes with a 30-day money back guarantee is rather straight-forward, and there isn't any setup fee. The domain registration is $15 a year. For $7.77 a moth, I get 100 MB storage, 12 Gigs file transfer, domain parking, 50 POP3 email accounts, 100 email forward, web- based email, FrontPage 2002 extensions installed, and 24/7 FTP access. This package includes everything I need to host and administer my website. But if I wanted to expand the possibilities, I could add 5 MB extra disk space for $1 per month, 5 POP more email account for $1 per month, 10 email forwarding accounts for $1 per month, domain point for $25 one-time fee, SSL setup for $30 setup fee, MySQL setup at $30, and CGI script installation at $35 an hour. If you really want to have some free hosting, refers your friends to PowWeb, and when they sign up for a one-year package or a two-year package, and put your site down as referral, you'll get 2 months free or 3 months free hosting respectively.

What PowWeb Does Not Offer
PowWeb does not provide internet, telnet or shall access. Nor do they offer dedicated servers or server collocation, anonymous FTP support, Cold Fusion, ASP. Additionally, PowWeb does not provide any ecommerce or shopping cart software, but related software can be installed on their server.

PowWeb Billing
There are two payment plans, either $93.24 for a one-year package, or $186.48 for a two-year package. You cannot pay by month. PowWeb accepts credit cards, checks, money orders, Western Union, and cashiers checks.

Domain Name
My first question was: Who owns the domain name if I wanted to register a domain through PowWeb? Some web hosting services are quite tricky, you register through them, they take all the control. But not with PowWeb, I am the technical and administration contact for my own domain. As well, if I decided to change web hosting service, I can take my domain name with me to somewhere else.

PowWeb also offers to transfer domain names at no cost for their clients to them if the domain names are registered through NSI. Additional domain names cannot be pointed to a main account for a one-time setup charge of $25 per domain.

Note that PowWeb does not offer multiple domain name hosting under one package, therefore they cannot point the second domain name to a different folder in the main account, but to the same index.html page of the main website. As well sub-domains cannot be pointed to a folder in the home directory, although they can be created using DSN.

As of this writing, PowWeb can only initiate domain modification requests for domains ending in .com, .net and .org.

Email
Master mail account is set up automatically setup. Unlimited email aliases is allowed. Email attachments are limited to 5MB. However, attachments or html files cannot be viewed with the web based mail. But incoming emails can be set up to be forward to another email address, or set up the POP account with Netscape Mail 4.5, Eudora Mail, Outlook Express 5, Miscrosoft Outlook 98, or Microsoft Outlook 2000. For outgoing emails, users can use the PowWeb SMTP, and up to 1,000 outgoing emails within a 24 hours period is allowed

Technical Overview
PowWeb uses Dual 866Mhz PIII servers running UNIX-based FreeBSD. Each server has at least 1 Gig of SDRAM. They also run CGI version of PHP version 4.0.5, and Perl version 5.005_03. Perl is what was recommended for writing CGI, but C will work if the CGI scripts are precompiled. PowWeb offers customers access to add, remove or edit A records, CNAME's and MX records , but they don't provide technical support for any DNS modifications. Although there is no limited to the number of MySQL database one can have, only one database will be given by PowWeb, and one user will have full access to that database. Java applets are supported, but not Java servlets.

In Conclusion
I have no idea how big or small a company PowWeb is, but it doesn’t matter, big company is not necessarily good, and small ones are not necessarily bad. All I know is that I have pretty good experience with PowWeb though some problems occurred, but they were not anything that could not be corrected, and PowWeb proved that they did their utmost to make everything right. Their website is clean, professional, and informative. Besides, I like their simple way of doing business, you know exactly what you'll get before hand. For $8.95 a month including web hosting at $7.77 a month, and domain registration at $15 a year, I have a lot of fun! However, one thing I must point out is that PowWeb doesn't seem to have backup server in case a server is down. As long as PowWeb keeps their promised 99.7% uptime, I will continue to be happy.


Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): $7.77