About Powweb
Founded in 1999, Powweb is one of the largest hosting providers out there. Because of this they are able to offer tons of bandwidth, disk space, and features for a low price. Because the hosting area is becoming increasingly commoditized, the needs of future customers will swing more towards reliability and support. Companies will have to improve their services to stay competitive. Powweb is a great example of a company that is always trying to improve. Powweb is constantly instituting improvements - they have improved their bandwith, disk space, webmail, control panel all in the last 6 months.
Price & Capacity
Powweb offers a single plan for $7.77 per month. If you sign up under one of their 2-year specials that give you 14 months free you can actually lower your per month cost to $4.90 per month. With this you get 300 GB of disk space and 3000 GB of transfer. This is an unbeatable deal. Although Powweb's single plan doesn't allow you to switch up to a higher plan, Powweb's philosophy is that they want to give you so much available capacity that you won't need a better plan. They are constantly increasing their available bandwidth and disk space. For example, from 2003 to 2007 they increased their bandwidth gradually from 60 GB to 3000 GB. Powweb's plan will meet the needs of 99.9% of all web sites. For the rare web sites that get up to 5,000-15,000 visitors they may need to switch to a lower-cost dedicated hosting.
Features
Powweb has a very easy to use Control Panel with many features. In February of 2006 they did a redesign of their control panel to make it more user-friendly. They also have many scripts, script installers, and ecommerce options. They offer CGI-bin, web stats, SSL Secure Server, Frontpage Extensions, DNS Control, 5 MySQL databases, and web-based e-mail.
Reliability and Support
Powweb has always had their fair share of dissapointed customers. Because of this Powweb has a lukewarm reputation for reliability. But this has a lot to do with the fact that they are such a big company. Like AOL, they are a fast-growing mass-market company who has such a large customer base to please that you will always be hearing a few dissenting voices. They have load-balanced servers to spread out the traffic and I think as their grow slows you will see improving levels of uptime. Their customer support is also improving as they added chat support alongside their e-mail and phone support. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Random
One of the most under-rated features of Powweb is their extremely busy and helpful forum. Their admins and other users help you solve many of the problems you will have. The system will send a bandwidth notice email to the Administrative Email on the account when you reach 75% of monthly bandwidth quota.
Hidden Limits
- Script time limit - All PHP/CGI scripts must complete within a 60 second timeslice. When using a PHP upload script you can probably upload an 8-10 MB file max in that timeslice. When using a PERL upload script that might be more like 14-18 MB.
- Email per day - Limit of 2,000.
- Email size - There is a max email Size including attachments of 10MB. Their Squirrel Mail system may have problems with attachments that big.
- Email storage - The recommended maximum size for a mailbox is 300 MB, the default size is 25 MB (that’s the size that a new mailbox is created as).
- Maximum emails per hour - 500 per email address.
- Maximum emails per 24 hour period - 5,000 per email address (re-calculated hourly by dropping oldest hour each hour). Note: if you hit the hourly limits from one email address/box the system automatically shuts down all inbound and outbound mail addresses on your account. Also, you don't get a notification.
- Message Limits - Using the Web mail interface, a maximum of 50 email recipients per email message. Using an authenticated SMTP client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird), a maximum of 100 email recipients per email message. If you have more than 200-300 messages, and you're doing a Newsletter/Bulk broadcast, you should look at the Constant Contact Service (there is a gateway link to it in the Newsletter Manager option of OPS) -- they can handle a mailing of any size.
- FTP speeds - 150 Kbps speed typical, up to about 300 KBps.
- MySQL - You cannot connect to an externally hosted MySQL database from the system - but you can connect to a database on another Powweb account.
- MySQL database size - There is no fixed limit on the size of a MySQL database. However, performance may suffer.
- MySQL connections - Ther eis a limit of 10 concurrent MySQL connections. It has been said that there has never been a report of this limit being hit.
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| Price: | 9 / 10 |
| Features: | 9 / 10 |
| Reliability: | 7 / 10 |
| Service: | 7 / 10 |
| Bandwidth: | 3,000 GB |
| Disk Space: | 300 GB |
| Price: | $7.77/mo. |
| Mailboxes: | 650 |
| MySQL Databases: | 5 |
- Currently 3.25/5
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Rating: 3.3/5 (152 votes)
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