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Launched in 1999 by
Andrew Te, PowWeb is one of the oldest hosting providers on the internet that
offers a single plan package. It offers a one-size-fits-all web hosting package
that includes all the necessities of building a site as well sustaining it.
Whether you want to register a domain, analyze site stats, manage databases, or
host a public-facing web project, all is possible under this single plan.
Although originally
founded in Massachusetts, PowWeb’s datacenter is today found in Los Angeles. The
company started off as a private entity before Endurance International Group
acquired it in 2006. At the time, it had the cheapest hosting plan rates in US
and was one of the few web hosts that charged zero fee for administration
services. Today, it targets small and medium-sized businesses with an aim to
provide a reliable platform to get their products or services to the internet market.
To keep its hosting
services on top of the game, it retained its hardware and software engineers who
understand the single-plan infrastructure better. The end gain is a company
that’s stable, trustworthy, and importantly understands customer needs to the
letter. Again, PowWeb uses a proprietary system that employs load-balancing
technology.
Essentially, this is a
networking breakthrough that creates multiple paths to the internet for web
projects. It eliminates the downtime experienced whenever servers are on
updates, crash repairs, or offline. As such, it is a company you can rely on as
a beginner or seasoned webmaster.
In our PowWeb Review
2018, we’ll explore the hosting packages including services and prices, the
features the company offers, its pros and cons, and finalize by checking some
of PowWeb FAQs.
Even with its one-plan
hosting package, the network allocations are perfectly suited for any-size web
project. The sites run on shared servers with each occupying a separate working
folder. The design is so that access to the computing resources is completely
independent and orderly. Interestingly, there are no limits as to how disk
space or bandwidth the websites consume. The company provides these two resources
on an unmetered basis.
Besides hosting,
PowWeb provides other complementing services ranging from web design, site
locking, email hosting, domain services, and CMS hosting. You can customize the
web projects to be served in any of the firm’s server locations. Let’s now
explore the packages and services PowWeb offers to you:
This package is
designed to share server resources amongst various users. The servers use load
balancing technology which is a solution created to eliminate points of
failure. In other words, your hosted web projects have access to multiple paths
that relay their data to target destination or audience. It is a solution that’s
ideal for critical mission sites, business websites, and other enterprises that
fully depend on uptime to achieve their set purpose.
The technology is
employed so that there’s redundancy in the system by having physical servers
share the load amongst themselves. With this, 100% uptime is achieved.
All users have full
access to vDeck control panel which allows management of DNS, creation of
subdomains, and reach to the web-based file manager. Also, you can protect the site
directories using passwords to control access and increase privacy. In case
your site has issues, custom error pages including 404, 505, 403 are available
to stand by as the error awaits resolving. The websites in your account, additionally,
get automated daily backups and instant snapshots that enhance reinstatement to
a former working state. The platform which PowWeb uses for hosting is Unix.
In case you’re using
content management systems as the basis for your site, each account has access
to script installers. You can install modules, packages, themes, etc. on your
WordPress, phpBB, and oscommerce-based web project. The supported programming
languages and software in the Unix shared environment include PHP 5 & 7,
CronJobs, flash, Midi, and Shockwave. As for the databases, there are two
officially supported namely MySQL and phpMyAdmin. The content in them receives
daily backups as a prioritized action in the account.
Did you also know you
can analyze your site statistics and collect an informed report of its
performance? Well, the inbuilt statistics and log manager allow you to collect
bandwidth report, access error log files, log site performance in real time,
and compare it to competitors in the search engine.
Pricing
PowWeb offers a single
plan for the shared web hosting package which you can purchase on an annual,
biannual, or triannual basis. The longer your subscription is the higher the
discounts in the pricing. For a one year hosting, PowWeb charges $50.16 or
$4.18 per month. For two-year hosting, you pay $93.12 or $3.88 per month while
for triannual hosting, you pay $139.68 or $3.88 per month. The hosting
environment which you get is ecommerce ready. It includes a free shared SSL
certificate, inbuilt oscommerce shopping cart, and PayPal payment processor.
PowWeb offers email
services through Microsoft Exchange which allows for simple management of
emails, tasks, and contacts from various devices. With the service, you get to
sync content from your email account across all devices which you use. Also, you
receive a free desktop license which allows installation of the emailing app on
computers. This way, sharing of contact info, communicating with customers, and
marketing is simply enhanced.
Pricing
There are three plans
for this service:
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Exchange Basic
This plan costs
$155.40 per year or $12.95 per month for a mailbox with a holding capacity of 5
gigabytes. You can choose to pay quarterly at $38.85 if the annual subscription
is too high.
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Exchange Plus
This plan’s asking
price is $59.85 quarterly and $215.46 annually for a mailbox with 10 gigabytes
storage.
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Exchange
Premium
It costs $104.85
quarterly and $377.46 annually to acquire this plan. The mailbox you get has a total
holding capacity of 25GB.
To give a unique
identifying name to your site, you require a hosting provider that offers
domain services. Now, PowWeb offers this service which allows for registration,
renewal, replacement, and sale of domain names. Other associated services
include purchase of domain credits, creation of subdomains, automated domain
renewals, and enhancement of domain performance.
Domain credits apply
to when you’re registering a new or existing domain name. Once you purchase
them, they won’t expire so you can use them as long as you wish to keep your
preferred domain name. Domain privacy works to protect information entered
during registration of a domain name. The info includes you name, phone number,
address, etc. which can be abused by telemarketers, spammers, and other
undesired third parties. PowWeb’s domain privacy service ensures you retain
your domain name without necessarily revealing the personal info associated
with it to the public. The company automatically forwards requests to view this
info to you so that you can decide whether to share it or not. The service
costs $9.99 per year.
Enhancing of domain
performance is made possible via premium DNS from Comodo. The service allows
you to set DNS servers that relay content via the closest nodes. Also, it uses
the caching technology to preserve frequently accessed content in memory. This
way, sites load faster and site abandonment by visitors gets eliminated. To get
the premium DNS, you’ll pay $7.99 per month or $83.88 annually.
Subdomains are an easy
way to host various web contents that you want the visitors to check out.
PowWeb allows you to direct traffic to these key pages as long as you
registered your domain name with them and you’re on the Unix platform.
Site locking is new
service that PowWeb now offers to provide security against cyber-attacks. It
helps in scanning for malware, securing sites from blacklisting, and providing
a site-lock badge to gain trust from visitors. It blocks suspicious activity
automatically and provide notification via the email and control panel of an
attempted breach. There are three plans to use this tool-as-a-service in its
entirety. These are:
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Find Plan
On purchasing this
plan, PowWeb will scan for malware on a daily basis. Also, they’ll conduct a
vulnerability scan on your site and block automated bot attacks if they find
any. The plan costs $1.94 per month.
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Fix Plan
The difference with
Find Plan is that Fix Plan automatically removes malwares on top of scanning.
The company charges $6.97 per month for this plan.
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Prevent
It is the most
comprehensive plan of them all. It ensures your website is scanned for malware
on a daily basis, malwares are automatically quarantined, and traffic to and
from your site goes via a restrictive firewall. It costs $38.75 per month to
use the plan.
Content management
systems are increasingly becoming useful in site creation and management.
PowWeb offers an optimized environment to host these applications with WordPress
having its own set of plans. Let’s now explore what the company includes in
this package.
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WordPress
Hosting
The WordPress package
comes with two plans namely WP starter and WP Essential. On the starter pack,
which costs $3.75 per month, you get a customized control panel, preinstalled
themes, and standard support. The site is hosted on a shared server to lower
operational costs.
As for the Essential
pack, which costs $6.95 per month, support is provided by WP experts and
high-speed loading of the site guaranteed by using Solid State Drives. Storage
and bandwidth is completely unmetered for all WP plans as well as number of
email accounts to create for your project. Registration of the domain name
which the WP site uses is also totally free for the first time registration.
On top of hosting your
site, PowWeb also provides marketing strategies and tools to make it known to
target audience. Below are some of the subservices falling under this package:
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Design
Under this service,
PowWeb takes care of building the looks of your website thereby allowing you to
have more time for money-making undertakings. They have lots of templates and
themes to ensure every site they design on your behalf is unique.
-
Search Engine Optimization
This service involves
optimizing your site content to contain keywords that visitors search online.
PowWeb provides a team of SEO professionals to undertake the task which can be
on a new site or an existing one. They’ll polish existing text or completely
write original content on your behalf at an agreed cost.
-
Payment Processor Environment setup
Ecommerce sites depend
on online payment processors to complete transactions at the point of sale.
PowWeb tech team offers to set up the payment environment to ensure your
visitors pay securely and you, on the other end, receive money for the service
or good you provided. Mostly, they’ll offer to create a PayPal account and link
it to your website. Nevertheless, you can have them set up credit and debit
card processors as an alternative payment method.
Plan Name | Disk Space | Bandwidth | Currency | Admin panel | OS | Websites | Scripting | Email-Transport | Database | SSH | Databackups | Free Domain | 1-Click Installer | Websites Builder | Location | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
One Plan | - | - | USD | Admin panel | ![]() |
1 | PHP | IMAP, POP3, SMTP | MySQL | ![]() |
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$ 3.88 |
On this section, we’ll
discuss the features that PowWeb has in relation to performance, speed,
security, customer support, and control. We’ll also check out how its
money-back guarantee works and the terms and conditions that govern the policy.
PowWeb provides
hosting on a shared platform where multiple web projects lie on a single
server. Although this is an old-fashioned type of hosting, the company employs
various measures to ensure performance remains decent. These include:
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Load balancing
This technology relies
on multiple physical servers that work together by sharing the load to make it lightweight
and manageable. PowWeb mirrors site data across its servers so that when one
goes offline or fails, the others take over and keep it online. This way, the
website will never experience downtime.
-
Custom DNS
Management
PowWeb offers
Comodo domain name servers at an extra fee. Also, it allows you to enter IPs of
your alternative servers at the control panel. The function is to ensure the
caching of the domain name which improves site loading speed across various
networks.
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Support for
MySQL and phpMyAdmin
These two
databases work with most web projects and are extremely effective for data
entry. They’re also lightweight and capable of accepting lock keys for data
security. Besides, the content on the databases is automatically backed up on a
daily basis.
-
Site
Statistics Logger
PowWeb
accounts come with Webalizer and AWStats which are great site stats loggers.
You can use them to collect the bandwidth report, access error logs, and
evaluate health of the site across intermittent periods. Basically, the tools
are an easy-way to tell how your website is performing since going live.
-
Hosting on the
Unix platform
Unix is the
operating system which PowWeb uses for its hosting servers. The platform is not
only reliable but also very versatile in regards to the tools and languages
that it supports. It can handle complex computing tasks, multi-levelled flux in
the network, and run modern applications fluidly. Currently, it supports PHP
version 5 & 7, Shockwave, Flash Players, and task schedulers including
CronJobs.
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SEO
professionals
Search Engine
Optimization is the quickest way to advertise your website to potential
clients. PowWeb SEO team optimizes your site content and collaborate with the
company’s web designers to create a lightweight masterpiece. This way, search
engines can easily index your website and rank its URL on the top search
results.
-
SSDs for
storage
PowWeb runs
servers with solid state drives which are highly efficient in storing data.
They outperform traditional SATA disks in speed and enhance data integrity reliably.
When it comes
to security, PowWeb is keen to implement a number of measures to increase it.
The end gain is a public-facing website without the risk of damage and data
theft. Let’s explore these security measures, tools, and features:
-
Shared SSL
Certificate
A secure
socket layer adds encryption to site data during its relay from the server to
the browser and vice-versa. This function helps in preventing spying apps or
services from accessing sensitive info. PowWeb offers this certificate to all
accounts for free although it’s shared amongst a number of users.
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SiteLock
This tool
provides protection against cyber-attacks which are highly prevalent in the
modern times. With it, you can scan for malware on your site data, put a lock
badge on your URLs, and eliminate possible URL blacklisting instances on the
internet.
Also, it will
block requests from bots which are used in DDOS as well as locking the back
door which facilitates exploitation. The tool works with ordinarily built sites
and content management systems including WordPress.
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Spam Filters
These are
included in the email accounts to block malicious messages from telemarketers
and spammers. You can set email lists which you trust and also place some addresses
on probation for further analysis. The mailboxes use POP3, SMTP, and IMAP
protocols which provide pathways that are highly secure for email exchange.
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Accredited
Payment Processors
PowWeb works
with PayPal and acknowledged payment gateways to provide an ecommerce-ready
environment. Your visitors will be able to use major credit cards and PayPal to
pay for the services or goods that you site sells.
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Data backup
PowWeb takes a
snapshot of your site data on a daily basis to restore it in case of loss, theft,
or damage. The function is automated and completely free for all their
customers.
PowWeb’s
default control panel is vDeck which is accessible upon registering an account
with them. The control tool uses a web interface to manage various
configurations and services within your web space.
With it you
can edit domain name servers, view your billing information, manage scheduled
tasks, activate script installers, manage files, and access site stats
analyzers. Although basic in function, it is very easy to use. Besides, it
contains links to the help pages within PowWeb website.
As earlier
mentioned, you can activate script installers from vDeck. Essentially, this
tool helps in installation of apps, modules, scripts, and services in your
website operating environment. This way, you can control how your website
behaves when it goes live.
Unfortunately,
PowWeb doesn’t support cPanel which is a great alternative to vDeck.
Nevertheless, you’ll still be able to manage your account as effectively as you
would with cPanel.
PowWeb takes
customer service very seriously since almost all its pages have access to the
customer support portal. You can reach out to the support staff or get help via
email, phone calls, and articles on their knowledge base. Email response is not
as fast as you’d expect in a provider its size.
It takes
around 15 minutes to get attended to when you further an issue. Calls are
instant but sometimes you may have to wait for a few minutes before the support
staff attends to you.
One of the
most outstanding features that we found at PowWeb is that the help articles are
classified into various categories. To name but just a few, they have Account,
Database, Domains, Files, Policies, Email, and Scripting categories. You can
manually explore each or use the search button to find a topic of concern.
The database
holding the help articles is quite optimized judging by the speed which it
returns search results. Also, most keywords we search get relevant topics which
answer quickly the questions we have.
Lastly, PowWeb
boasts a forum with over 20,000 members where you can help from other customers.
Although the answers given on the section are not 100% reliable, the provider
allows them to be rated by members when they’re insightful.
PowWeb offers a
30-day money-back guarantee period following the purchase of any account from
them. In case you wish to cancel the contract, you’ll receive a full refund of
the basic hosting fees. In case you chose to use their free domain name,
they’ll deduct $15 from your due amount. The cost covers their expenses of
registering the domain name with relevant authorities. But you’ll retain
possession of the domain name for a year to use or point it elsewhere.
As part of
fair usage policy, the user who wishes to terminate the hosting contract must
have used the resources allocated within normal limits. Also, the account must
have no history of usage in illegal services within the hosting period. More
information on the terms and conditions is detailed in PowWeb’s User Agreement
page.
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X7 Chat Module
This module
makes it possible for instant chats between you and your visitors and amongst
themselves. You can easily install it using the script installer which is
accessible from the control panel
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AdWords
PowWeb offers
$100 Google, Yahoo, and Bing AdWords to help with marketing on these search
engines. Moreover, they list your site on Yellow Pages to increase visibility
to potential customers.
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Weebly Site Builder
PowWeb has no
site builder of its own thus it partnered with Weebly to offer the service. The
tool allows for drag & drop feature and supports a wide range of web
elements from maps, images, videos, to audios.
There are a lot
of considerations to make when deciding to use PowWeb as your next hosting
provider. This section will outline its pros and cons so that you can have an
easy time making a decision.
-
Fairly decent
load speeds
PowWeb’s
average loading speed is 769ms which is rather decent for a provider with
shared web hosting package only.
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Powerful
security measures
Besides
physical datacenter protective measures, this web host provides a secure
platform to host any nature site. They have free SSL certs, spam filters,
SiteLock, and automated backup system as part of the security enhancement
measures.
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Suitable for
beginners
The services PowWeb
offers are not only cheap but also standardized for most beginners. It is
one-stop place to get all the web mastering components when you’re starting out
in the field.
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Huge and
detailed help database
This company offers helpful documentation on issues spanning from
account, payment, file management, security, to email services. You can easily
familiarize with hosting jargons with their easy-to-comprehend descriptions.
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Professional
experts and support staff
PowWeb hosting
has very talented webmasters and customer attendants. They are easy to reach to
and make sound communication with in a single session.
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Easy
installation of apps
PowWeb gives
access to Mojo Marketplace which a richly-populated store for modern apps and frameworks.
The inbuilt installer ensures management is an ever-smooth and straightforward
process.
-
Prices are not
constant
On first
registration the prices are lower but upon renewal the rates go up.
-
Single hosting
type
Only shared
web hosting is available. If your website outgrows the resources for this type
of hosting, you have no option to upgrade to better performing packages such as
VPS and dedicated server hosting.
-
Support for
few CMS
PowWeb
supports just WordPress out of the box. Other alternative but equally popular
CMS such as Drupal, PrestaShop, Joomla, etc. are not on board.
-
Lacks monthly
billings
All the
services have to be paid on a quarterly, annual, or biannual term.
-
Tough terms
and conditions for contract cancellation
Besides being
charged $15 for cancellation when using a free domain name, your account must
have complied with several other conditions which might be unavoidable.
-
No official
guaranteed uptime
Most hosting
providers will give a percentage of guaranteed uptime to ensure you’re
compensated when you face downtime. PowWeb lacks this official uptime
guarantee.
-
Besides shared web hosting, which other type of
hosting is at PowWeb?
PowWeb only
offers shared web hosting and no other types of hosting on its infrastructure.
Nevertheless, the package is sufficient for small and medium-sized sites since
bandwidth and storage are unlimited.
-
Does PowWeb offer Windows Hosting?
No, at the
moment they only offer a Unix environment. The OS works amazingly well with
most programming languages and frameworks. Therefore, it will suffice just fine
in cases where Windows environment would be suitable.
-
Which server locations will my website have?
PowWeb offers
four server locations namely United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and
Australia.
-
When migrating from another provider, will I be
assisted?
Unfortunately,
PowWeb doesn’t offer migration services. As such, you’ll need to have a copy of
the website on your local storage to drag and drop to the company’s inbuilt
site builder.
-
How do I built a website from scratch using PowWeb’s
tools?
Well, Weebly
site builder, which PowWeb partners with, is the easiest tool to use in website
creation. As for the content, you can reach out the design and marketing team
to help you out.
-
Does the shared server have limits in regard to
storage and bandwidth?
Sure, it does.
Nevertheless, under normal operation your web projects might not hit that
limit. Also, considering the resources are on shared platform, the company will
migrate users with heavy usage to more powerful servers.
-
Does PowWeb backup web project files on behalf of
customers?
Yes. They have
an automated backup system that takes snapshots of the websites on a daily basis.
However, custom backup frequency is not available and thus you might need
another backup system if PowWeb’s is not as regular as you want.
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Does PowWeb offer domain name services?
Yes, PowWeb
offers domain registration and renewal services. They have detailed the nature
of the service on their website.
-
Besides WordPress, can I use sites based on other
frameworks at PowWeb?
Yes, but
WordPress has an optimized environment on their servers. As for the other
frameworks, we might not reliably recommend hosting them on their platform.
Besides security concerns, their operational speeds might not be at the optimal
level.
-
Must I use SiteLock at PowWeb?