Editors PowWeb Review

PowWeb Review

Stay away from PowWeb.

It's a confusing, disorganized place and even though it's relatively inexpensive at less than 8 bucks a month, you can find much better value with other webhosts.

We tried out the only plan PowWeb offers. For $7.77 per month you get 1000MB of storage space and 5GB per day of bandwidth. Although this works out to roughly 150GB per month, the PowWeb fine print tells a different story.

If your website suddenly gets very busy one day it will be disabled because you are not allowed to average your bandwidth out over the course of a month like you can with most webhosts. You are limited to 5GB per day, period.

The signup process was relatively uneventful and we were welcomed with account management instructions about 30 minutes after we clicked "checkout". Unfortunately account management is where the webhosting experience becomes a little fuzzy with PowWeb.

Navigate through PowWeb's control panel or "Ops" panel as they like to call it and you quickly end up with a mess of red-colored windows that pop open when you select different links. You also end up with three or four levels of navigation bars, each containing even more links.

The "Ops" center (just writing "Ops" makes us chuckle) offers a "Resource Center" which contains "a wide array of web building tools, resource links and online generators to help you create a dynamic site!" according to the description. Exploring this area requires that you login all over again.

When we finally made it into the resource center we were thoroughly disappointed. Site tools consisted of 2 color pickers, one of which didn't work. Other tools included numerous amateurish looking templates, and a marketing link, which consisted of Whois, Ping and Traceroute utilities (we are not sure what kind of marketing PowWeb had in mind). The website creation utility looked like a glimmer of hope, however we were prompted to login yet again and this time our "Ops" access wouldn't work.

Also inside the "Ops" Center is a "Scripts Center," but there aren't any scripts in there. That's because they're "Coming Soon."

PowWeb has plenty of online support web pages with plenty of broken links and documents that do not display properly in our standards compliant Firefox web browser. A quick scan of the web-based support forums indicate daily email and database outages.

Honestly we never even got as far as creating a website with PowWeb. You have so many choices when it comes to web hosting companies we recommend you stay away from this one.

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