Gripes – POWWEB
POWWEB.COM (web host provider)
On 09/30/2002 I decided to find a new host provider for my site (http://www.sphereserver.net). It requires MySQL, PHP, sub-domains and roughly a 1GB transfer per day. After a thorough search of the web using host tools like www.hostsearch.com, I found POWWEB, the self proclaimed “perfect host”. Not true. Well their web page sounds really great. They offer full services and 30G transfer per month for cheap. Don’t be fooled! As far as I can tell they have no intention of actually honoring that agreement. In my case, the site had been running tolerably for 2 weeks, one day I found the site not working. After days of trying to contact the admin I finally got the explanation it had been turned off for “resource abuse”, not for data transfer but CPU usage. Not so much as an email. In fact it took 4 days before they even responded. The site had been running for over a year on other servers without a hitch.
Evaluation: POWWEB sucks. Read the fine print in the agreement. It turns out they can turn you off and keep your money for ANY reason. (and do) It seems they overloaded their servers. When they discovered this they simply picked the top 2 sites on the server and turned them off. Sounds like good business to me, makes room for more paying customers with less popular sites. They already had my money anyhow. I had foolishly paid for a year in advance. Well hopefully a few people do a search and find this page before going to POWWEB.
OMG, the PowWeb migration was a disaster. I didn’t mind the company previously, but the new one seemed to have no problem turning people off and keeping the money. I had my site go through several migration attempts, but some of the scripts would not clear their automated QA because of URL checking to prevent spoofing. I explained this to their tech support and they assured me it would not be a problem when my domain was flipped to the new system. When the legacy servers started going down in September, I called again to make sure my migration was complete and they said everything was fine. Guess what? Somebody must have forgotten to tag my site as migrated because when October swung by, they deleted EVERYTHING off the new server at the same time they turned off the old servers forever. The old PowWeb used to back up data for 30 days, but were any of these transitional sites backed up? Nope. To make things better, it turned out my customer information was not copied from their legacy systems so they lost all my payment records! I was only partway into an annual cycle and they didn’t even know how much hosting time they still owed me. Their support staff then tried to convince me to sign up again and start over. FYI, the sales guy at my new hosting service was completely appalled to hear this. Everybody here has to make a big deal out of their experiences so the new owners at Endurance don’t get away with this.
Comment by Ripped Off — October 13, 2006 @ 3:47 am
I’m using hostsave just renamed to http://www.gate.com now. have not had a problem with it (so far) . I’m not sure how all the features really stack up now though. The features promised by powweb look really great, but of course promises don’t really count for much. I looked into another host called http://www.ipowerweb.com. They look almost as good for the same money. Maybe they have some ethics too?
Update 2012: I have moved the site to DreamHost a while back. I never think about it. It just works. Relatively fast. A bit complex to set up but good.
Comment by admin — November 16, 2006 @ 3:47 pm
i am a customer of powweb and there spam sontrol sucks they mark spam as spam even though it isnt spam. they scan internal email, and wont let you whitelist internal email. if you disagree with the all might tech support they yell and scream at you. that is unprofessional and uncalled for. i am going to look for a new hosting company.
Comment by mark — July 24, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
POWWEB SUCKS!! They falsely advertise “unlimited space” but they LIE, as they have a 25 gig HARD REQUIREMENT. I was just a couple gigs over and they SHUT ME DOWN. POWWEB and false advertising! I’ve reported them to the better business bureau and SO SHOULD YOU.
Comment by mark — June 29, 2013 @ 12:42 pm