2021 PowWeb WordPress Hosting Review - Is It Good?

PowWeb is a privately-owned hosting provider established in 1996, who now serves over 100,000 users. Since Andrew Te, the founder, sold it to Endurance, PowWeb hosting service undergoes a decline as many users respond. To check out whether this company is suitable for building WordPress sites or not, our editors made this comprehensive review in the aspects of price, features, uptime, speed and technical support.

Webmasters who are lingering on this host’s WordPress hosting quality and service shall refer to the following overall chart, which comes from its real customers’ feedbacks and our authentic investigation.

Price & Plan

PowWeb offers a simple “one plan” package. This feature-rich plan is at a cost-effective price of $3.88/mo lately, which is 54% off the regular $8.49/mo. With affordable price, this host also claims 30-day money-back guarantee so that customers can ask for a refund within 30 days if they are unsatisfied with the service quality.

Webmasters should note that there is a non-refundable fee of $15 if they want the domain kept, because the domain name is permanent that it can be transferred or simply located elsewhere. Meanwhile, the money-back guarantee is only valid for credit card payment due to the costs associated with processing payments made by other methods.

Moreover, the company provides plenty useful marketing credits containing $100 Google AdWords, a total of $25 Yahoo! & Bing sponsored search credits and $50 Facebook ad credits.

Features

The one plan PowWeb holds is featured with 75 MySQL databases, unlimited RAID storage, bandwidth and mailboxes. It supports PHP4 & PHP5, Perl5, Zend Optimizer, CGI-BIN, SSL, shared SSL, .htaccess and Cronjobs, but Ruby on Rails is not included in the plan.

In terms of control panel, this provider employs a custom one called Member Operations Center or OPS. Webmasters should feel safe using this self-developed control panel, because experts are very familiar with this software so that they have their own way and technology to make out the solution.

However, webmasters need be careful about OPS’s usability. Comparing with the most widely used cPanel, which is with one-click installation, this custom control panel is not so easy-to-use and operable. Besides, the interface it presents is not as clean and organized as that of other control panels.

Uptime

PowWeb announces 99.9% uptime. This guarantee is fulfilled by 24×7 continuous monitoring on the network activity that ensures the system up to the maximum extent. In a few months, our experienced editors have been closely observing the uptime on the WordPress sites built with the service the company provides. The testing result is 99.6%.

Performance

Different from the uptime accomplishment, PowWeb shows its weakness in performance part. Concluded from what we have investigated, the server response time in the hosting market averages 550ms, however, the response time this company can realize is almost 708ms, which to a large extent accounts for the poor efficient HTTP servers located in Boston, MA.

Technical support

Customers are ensured a wholesome technical support for consultation and after-sale customer service with 24×7 live chat, email and toll-free call. This is the best offer for people who want an all-in-one after-sale service or many inexperienced webmasters who frequently come across troubles on running their sites.

Just one click of the mouse at the live chat icon, people can get their answers from the technical team within 10 seconds. The operators online are willing to give a hand with their professional service. However, the email support is not satisfactory. The company promises 2-4 hours waiting for replies, but such guarantee is, in fact, a long time waiting, because the practical situation is more frustrating after we sent them a couple of mails in different periods, but nothing we’ve received.

Summary

Concluded from what we have reviewed above, webmasters should have a clear understanding on PowWeb now. This provider shows its advantages in price and reliability while fails to offer high performance and easy-to-use control panel as well as responsive email support. Therefore, we decide not to recommend this host to WordPress users. For better service, the following alternatives are listed.