I have a podcast and needed to move it last month. Upon several recommendations, I moved it to Powweb since it did seem attractive price wise.

What a nightmare. Not only is there technical support the worst I have ever experienced in my life, I just had my account shut down and was sent an email about a support ticket that was "closed." Nothing at all about my account. When I went to see what ticket was closed (since I had one open from two weeks ago that still wasn't resolved,) I was forwarded to a page that told me I had been shut off.

When I called tech support, they told me I was being shut down for "using too many resources" but couldn't be more specific and told me that I needed to talk to tier 2 tech support. Of course, they could not forward me to tier 2 tech support, I am waiting for them to call me back.

Meanwhile, my site is down.

I told the sales person exactly what I'd be using the site for and how much usage I'd get and he assured me that it would be fine when he took my fee for a years worth of service. Now here I am, less than a month later with no service. Rather than call me and talk to me about their usage, they decided they would be better off just shutting off my account.

While I am waiting for them to call me back, I have nothing better to do but email people who endorse their service and inform them of how this company treats their customers and fill out online reviews. I highly encourage you to avoid these people at all costs!

--Joe

I have been a powweb customer for many years.
They are a low cost, ftp-only-access 3rd party service provider.
They claim to provide 'unlimited' disk space and bandwidth. However, yesterday I received an email stating that I was using too much disk space (?) and that my account would be suspended within 3 days if I didn't reduce the space.
The email claimed that I was using my PowWeb account for 'archival purposes'. This is patently false. I serve up a lot of video and audio content. These are recordings taken at my church. This are not backup storage.
Several years ago PowWeb claimed that my account could use 30G storage. Last year it claimed 300G. Now they say 'unlimited', but it seems like I am allowed to use less now than before. This is probably illegal. At best it is misleading and unethical.
I called their technical support to discuss this, and was told that I needed to reduce the amount of disk space. When I asked what the 'real' limit is, I was told that they cannot tell me that. I was advised to remove a bunch of files, and hope that it was enough that they wouldn't suspend my account. I asked if I could at least have until after next weekend, since this was a part-time effort for me and I had to work during the week, and I was told "no". My account would be suspended on Friday (in 2 days) if I didn't remove some unspecified number of files.
Does this sound like the sort of company you would want to do business with? I recommend that you do business with someone else.

great...!so far powweb is not bad for me..!

I have been a customer of Powweb since 2003 and have experienced the same as all of the above mentioned. Now I get my renewal notice for this month and the hosting package price has increased. No way. I'm taking my business elsewhere, as well as all of the other sites I work on.

Powweb, iPower, Startlogic, Ipowerweb are all the same companies. If you are serious about making websites, then avoid these companies. They are not honest in many things.

THEIR AVAGE WAIT TIME IS BETWEEN 1 1/2 HOURS TO 3 HOURS WAIT TIME ON CUSTOMER SERVICE.. WE HAVE BEEN WITH THEM FOR 5 YEARS, AND WITHIN THE LAST 6 MONTHS, IT SEEMS LIKE THEY HAVE BOTTOMED OUT.
WE DO NOT RECOMMED THEIR SERVICE, IT IS WORSE THAN POOR, AND WE WILL BE TAKING OUR CLINETS TO A HOSTING SERVICE THAT WANTS TO WORK WITH ITS CUSTOMERS.. I REPEAT THEIR SERVICE IS WORSE THAN POOR..
THEY WILL INTERRUPT YOUR SERVICE WITHOUT EXPLAINING TO YOU AND TYPE OF REASONS..
THEY WILL ALSO HANG THE PHONE UP ON YOU IF THEY CANNOT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, AND WILL NOT PUT A MANGER ON THE PHONE, OR EVEN HAVE THEM CALL YOU BACK..

Indeed! Very slow! Their 1 star ranking is well deserved!

From what I gathered, they are currently merging companies and swamped with work... so they have no time to improve their servers...

They'll probably go back to their better service levels, but for now... no way!!

You can use our test site to check PowWeb's server speed...

Did not realize they were sold. I manage multiple sites and they have all suffered in the past months. I will be moving all sites even before they expire. Extremely disappointed. Customer service non-existent - very long waits to get sub-par "service." Used to recommend to clients but will steer clients to real hosting companies.

www.powweb.com has been down for several hours this evening, as well as the website I am building. Like other people, I have experienced frequent outages. This may be because it is a DB driven application, but regardless... will be switching hosts now, rather than later.

Let me just add my voice to the chorus of voices writing about how horrid Powweb is. Everything you see written above is true. I've got some choice >:XX words for them. They are so horrid. Don't do business with them.

Totally agree with the comments here. The support for Powweb has gone down hill. Their uptime is a joke. I won't go into it in detail, but I spent the better part of a month arguing with them about their DNS servers, and in the meantime my (last) site that's hosted with them was pointing at their ad server. It would not even resolve by IP, but they tried to tell me this was my issue. Don't even get me started on their SQL servers, and all of the crap that I've gone through with them and PHP. Powweb used to be really great, good price for solid service. I recommended them to clients on a budget all of the time. Never will again, and will never use them again once my contract is up.

STAY-AWAY! Have used Powweb for clients and my own site in this last year. Everyone has had problems especially with setup requiring PHP scripting and in getting tech support. Usually have to wait, then you get mild put-offs and are requested to 'wait until the next CGI refresh' which are spaced 9 and 12 hours apart. Not only that, ONE domain redirect costs $7.95 per month...rip-off! You may as well get a whole new site for that price. Not flexible. Lots of 'quick-install' scripts are off the latest version... yuck. Go else where and save yourself the trouble.

PowWeb has more room for improvment than Planet Pluto has in Space! I have been with them for about two years; this last year i have seen customer support drop like a rock out of the sky. It is just not there any more. Their price may be cheap; but a person gets what they paid for!!!

Yes...agree to all above!

I use Powweb and unfortunately part of one of my sites (the most visited) uses a MySQL database.....

Verdict....any site that runs MySQL databases, expecially in the last 6 months, are going to run into VERY slow page load times.
(and sometimes the pages just never load at all)

Support is patchy....and usually results in someone saying "we are working on it" or "we are aware of the problem" or my personal favorite
"we looked at your site and it loads fine, the problem must be from your end"

For html sites Powweb are fine...for anything database driven avoid like the plague!

I have been with PowWeb for quite some time, about eight or nine years. This last year with them since they were bought by Endurance have been horrible, support and functionality wise.

If all you have is plain text/HTML pages, you're ok. If You have some PHP, should still be ok. If you use any, and I mean ANY MySQL db connections, forget it. Go to another host.

Powweb USED to be fast, before they were sold. Speed started decreasing and has pretty much brought things to a halt since they upgraded to php5. I currently use 5 MySQL databases and use php for my website. The forums only load at an acceptable speed about an hour out of the day.

Its very frustrating to have a cable internet connection, then site on your own site waiting for forums and posts within the forums to load.

Powweb has a lot of services, but they've been rendered useless by the lack of speed in loading pages. Tech support isnt very helpful either.

Ditto those comments. If you need MySQL integration thenplan on it being very slow and sometimes nonresponsive.

Since Powweb was sold to Endurance the quality of service has dropped big time. If your site uses MYSQL think twice before powweb. Endurance is using Powweb's good name to get customers. Load balancing is not a good idea when you keep allowing abusers to consume resources. Over selling you services and not adding hardware to cover it is also bad practice.

Yes they allow customers to voice their opinions on a forum. But some areas of the forum they must proof your post before allowing it. So much for being able to voice your opinion or complaints!! Fast and reliable don't belong in the same sentence as Powweb.