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Tight Budget? $5 Web Hosting
2,000 MB Disk Space + 50 GB Bandwidth Use coupon "10cheap" for another 10% Discount! Click Here for Details |
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Top 10 Hosts
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#6 Web Hosting - PowWeb Review"PowWeb has upgraded their hosting packages to offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth, still with amazing upload and download speeds! $5.77/month (Free Setup)
+ FREE Domain Name; 1 year or 2 year plan
Overview Don't confuse PowWeb with iPowerWeb as they are two different hosting providers. PowWeb is also one of the first hosts offering large bandwidth amounts to attract customers. They have been around since 1999 and have built up a good reputation in the cheap web hosting market. They offer one single hosting plan - PowValue, and now have well over 70,000 customers. Sample Site Way back in May 2005, we finally decided to move our sample site hosted by Globat to PowWeb. Following 2 years of close monitoring, we believe PowWeb is a better choice today. We noticed a significant change in upload and download speed after we switched to PowWeb. PowWeb servers truly are incredibly fast and reliable. One of the reasons is that PowWeb uses what is called "Load-Balanced Hosting", which essentially nixes any single points of failure. Your website always has multiple paths to keeping it up and running, so if one server goes down, there's another to cover and keep your web site live. Currently, our sample site has 150 JPG pictures using a mere 30 MB of disk space. Call it a coincidence, but just one week after we switched to PowWeb, the MSN search engine crawled our site and our traffic jumped considerably. We now use up to 5 GB of bandwidth every day. Plan Size and Features PowWeb has upgraded their plan once again to now offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Both existing customers and new customers will enjoy the new upgrade. PowWeb is giving the highest bandwidth limit among all other competitors for the price. They have included a generous 75 MySQL databases free in their hosting package, and you can also install the osCommerce shopping cart or Zen Cart from their control panel. With SSL and the shopping cart available, the plan is now e-commerce ready. There is a free scripts library for managing content, creating blogs, guest books, image galleries, discussion boards and more. PowWeb claims their Instant Script Installer is better than Fantastico and we cannot disagree. They also offer unlimited domain hosting and a free domain name for 1 and 2 year orders. Just remember that after the one-year contract, monthly rates go up to $7.77, which makes the two-year plan look even more tempting. Control Panel PowWeb has developed their own custom control panel software, called the Member Operations Center or "OPS". Please use "demo" as your username and password. Most web hosts use commercial control panel software such as CPanel or Plesk. The demo will show you the features inside OPS. It is actually quite powerful and easy to use. It handles most of the basic tasks, from billing to setting up email accounts and registering new domain names. Customer Support Their email support here is very good and effective. They were able to answer all of our questions, and every email sent was answered promptly. They've also added a toll-free line to their office, which is 1-877-4POWWEB (1877-476-9932). The toll-free line is available Monday to Friday 6am-8pm PST and Saturday to Sunday 11am-4pm PST. The line is available to US and Canadian customers only. Live chat support is also available now! PowWeb has also been doing a great job preparing an informative frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on their web site. You can find a lot of solutions to your common problems and also a lot of tips and tricks, such as how to create custom error message, how to do HTTP streaming for real audio and many more. They also provide an online community forum as a place for their customers to meet (Just like LunarPages). It is a good place to meet some other PowWeb customers who are willing to help each other out. Web hosts with an open forum usually means they are quite confident of their services because they allow open discussion about them. An active forum with lots of customers also means that they have a successful and established business. Their forum has more than 11,500 members! PowWeb staffers will also be actively participating in the forum and even PowWeb founder and CEO, Andrew Te will be actively posting in the forum! Most company founders hide themselves from their customers, but for PowWeb, you can actually message Andrew directly via the forum! Limitations PowWeb seems to be addressing most of the limitations we have posted ever since we published our review 4 years ago. For example in January 2004, they installed AWStats to allow their customers to view the traffic statistics of their websites. Before that, they provided no web stats. And lastly, you are now able to create password protected directories directly via the control panel. We can see that PowWeb is constantly improving their hosting package. PowWeb also removed their maximum number of files limit. They used to have this "funny" limitation where each user could not have more than 50,000 files in an account. However, this has now been removed. It is good to know that our reviews may have some kind of an impact :) Free Domain Name If you are registering a new domain name for your hosting account, PowWeb will register it for you for free. This offer only applies to 1-year or 2-year orders. If you are transferring your domain/website to PowWeb, you will not get another free domain name. Conclusion
Our Advice If you want to go with PowWeb (there's no reason not to), make sure you order for at least 1 year to get a free domain name and some extra months of hosting. If you are planning on making a long term commitment to your website, consider taking the 2-year plan and locking in the $5.77 rate for even longer. |
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