PowWeb Review - California Web Site Hosting Provider

Ranking:	Top 5
Monthly Price:	$7.77 & Free Setup (Promotion - 6 months free PLUS $5 discount*!)
Key Features:	5,000 MB Disk Space, 300 GB Bandwidth
Corporate Office:	PowWeb Inc, 1005 East Las Tunas Drive #125 San Gabriel, CA 91776, USA
Toll Free Tel:	1-877-4-POWWEB (1-877-476-9932)
Website:	PowWeb.com

Latest News:
Apr 26, 2005 - PowWeb.com increased the disk space from 2,000 MB to 5,000 MB and further improved the bandwidth from 5 GB per day to 10 GB per day in their One-Plan Package. Current customers will have the increases integrated into their hosting plans automatically.

Nov 18, 2004 - PowWeb.com upgraded their One-Plan Package to offer more disk space. The new One-Plan Package has improved to 2,000 MB of disk space (up from 1,000 MB).

* If you choose to host with PowWeb, you can have an exclusive coupon for $5 off on any order now. Just enter the coupon code take5 in the Promotional Code field to receive this discount. This offer is expiring on August 31, 2005.

Overview
PowWeb Inc, is a privately owned California web site hosting company that has been in business for more than 6 years now. Since PowWeb was founded in 1999, it has established itself as a leader in the lowest price web hosting industry sector. Unlike many web hosting companies offer many different hosting options, PowWeb focuses only on a single hosting plan, One-Plan Package. By concentrating only one web hosting package, PowWeb is able to cut down its overhead costs and pass the savings directly to you. As of Feb 2005, PowWeb has 60,000 satisfied customers from around the world.

As a member of the Better Business Bureau, you can expect PowWeb to meet the Bureau's ethical business practices and to provide high-quality web hosting at an affordable price. If you order their one year prepay plan at $7.77/month, you get 1 year free domain name PLUS 2 months 6 months free now (Limited time promotion)!. Effectively, you are paying only $6.66 $5.18 per month! Now, it gets better if you order their 2 year prepay plan. Not only you will get 2 years free domain name but also another 6 months 14 months free!

Key Hosting Features
PowWeb constantly upgrade and improve its service features. The most recent improvement was on Apr, 2005 where they increased the disk space from 2,000 MB to 5,000 MB of Raid storage disk space. It is also the only web hosting company we had reviewed that offers the highest bandwidth of 10 GB per day (or, approximately 300 GB per month). The restriction is that the website cannot exceed the ceiling of 500,000 hits per day. PowWeb has imposed this limitation on March 5, 2005 with the objective to improve overall server performance to all their customers. In additional, PowWeb also enforces a maximum of 50,000 files that you can upload to the server which makes PowWeb the only web hosting provider that has such 'odd' restriction! Nevertheless, few websites will ever hit such limitation.

PowWeb's One-Plan Package hosting features are very complete and covered almost everything. This including server-side functionalities (CGI-BIN, Perl, PHP, SSI), FTP utility, 650 email accounts, Microsoft FrontPage Extension, 5 MySQL database, web statistic software and etc. Below are few special features that we would like to highlight:

e-Commerce Ready - PowWeb's One-Plan Package is e-commerce ready. It supports built-in osCommerce (Open Source e-Commerce) shopping cart and shared Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) secure certificate for online payment.

Template Gallery - PowWeb provides a large collection with hundreds of editable web page templates that you can use as-is or modify as you wish. Here is a screenshot of the Template Gallery. However, if you are not familiar with HTML or graphic tools, you can use their 'Easy Web Site Builder' to build your professional looked website even you don't have any web design or programming knowledge. You have up to 400 plus designs and 10,000 plus templates to choose from.

Control Panel - PowWeb supports a custom control panel called Member Operations Center (OPS). One of the downside of a custom control panel is that you probably have to spend more times to learn the OPS in order to configure your website. For instance, we had problems in setting up the email accounts using OPS as it is quite different from other more common control panel such as Plesk or CPanel. Another problem with OPS is the website configuration functionalities are not properly organized. As a result, it is difficult to find the functions that you want. For example, if you wish to add mySQL onto your website, you have go to a section under 'Billing/Plan' to find it! Nevertheless, their technical support staffs are always available and very helpful to solve such problems for you.

Marketing & Promotion - The marketing and promotion utilities provided by PowWeb are quite comparable to iPowerWeb. They supply "Popularity Checker" tool where you can check different search engines to see how many websites link back to your site. A "Meta Tag Generator" tool to generate a group of meta tags to assist you to create search engine optimized web pages. Plus, search engine submission tool to get your website listed on several popular search engines with only one click. Finally, you will also get $50 free Overture Credit to drive targeted traffic to your website through Pay-Per-Click marketing.

Customer Support
PowWeb provides a complete customer support solutions to their customers.

Toll-Free Phone - PowWeb provides toll-free telephone support at their main line: 1-877-4-POWWEB (1-877-476-9932) for customers in US & Canada. However, the toll-free support only offers during normal business hours (Pacific Standard Time). For International customers, you can reach PowWeb at non toll-free number: 310-278-8926.

24/7 Email support - PowWeb provides 24/7 Email support covers billing, sales and technical support. When you email their technical support, you will receive an autoreply with a tracking code number which can be used to track the status of your email and even how long it's been in the queue. Once, we had POP3 email setup problem. Their technical support suggested various solutions and followed up on the problem continuously. In the end, they managed to fix the problem and we were impressed with their technical support.

Live Chat - PowWeb offers live chat which powered by a customized Java Applet. You can chat online with their support staffs on any issues including pre-sales questions. However, they currently support the live chat from Monday to Friday only. Weekend live chat will be supported in the near future.

PowWeb FAQ - Here, you can search through PowWeb FAQ pages and find answers to many common asked questions in different categories.

PowWeb Tutorials - PowWeb web-based tutorials provide easy to follow step-by-step guides from setting up basic features of your new account to configure Perl/CGI/PHP.

PowWeb Community Forum - PowWeb has the largest and most active forum in the web hosting business with over 16,331 users as of Dec 9, 2004. You can interact with thousands of PowWeb users for advice and get help from other members on various issues including pre-sales queries.

Data Center
As a California web site hosting company, PowWeb data center facilities are located at the Garland Building in downtown Los Angeles. The data center facilities ensure high security, redundancy and scalability. PowWeb uses Network Appliance's enhanced RAID4 technology for the file storage (hold up to 18 terabytes of disk space). Their servers are powered by DELL 1750 and 2650 PowerEdge servers with 8GB of DDR memory. These speedy and robust servers ensure that your websites load quickly and available at all times.

Moreover, these servers are connected to the Internet in Tier 1 backbone using BGP4 technology for best routing and redundancy. The high quality bandwidth with 2 Gigabit feeds are provided by InterNap and Verio. Most importantly, their server clusters use multiple "Foundry Load Balancing" switches designed for failover in the event of a load balancer fault. You can find out how the PowWeb's proprietary load balancing technology that will ensure your website to experience zero downtime here!

Testimonials

Awards
PowWeb received few web hosting awards:

> "Top 5 Host Dec, 2004 " - Host Review
> "Top 25 Web Hosts" - Rate My Host
> "Guaranteed Host" - Find My Host

Summary
Our only complaint with PowWeb is the poorly designed control panel that is not user friendly. That said, PowWeb's One-Plan Package is still an ideal choice if your website requires huge disk space and attracts very high traffic. It's $6.66 $5.18 monthly fee (enjoy 6 months free hosting promotion now!), 5,000 MB of disk space, 300 GB of bandwidth and a free domain name come together to make One-Plan Package as one of the most affordable web hosting package in the market today. It's easy to see why we're tempted to recommend PowWeb the ideal web hosting choice!

Visit PowWeb Now !