PowWeb draws users in with a low introductory price but its high renewal prices and basic service make it hard to recommend.
PowWeb is a US-based web hosting company with more than two decades of experience in the market. It was founded in 1999 and the main office is located in Burlington (USA). From the beginning they have targeted small-to-medium sized businesses, and today they claim to have established a “leadership position” when it comes to budget-friendly web hosting. Along with many similar companies, they have also become part of EIG (Endurance International Group). Nevertheless, one thing stayed the same: PowWeb has offered its customers one hosting plan “to rule them all». There is no doubt that it is an affordable one for most budgets, but whether it offers a good quality for money we shall soon find out. PowWeb seems to be a bit reluctant when sharing information on itself, but we did manage to find enough about their only data center. It is presently located in Los Angeles and the company claims they use “load balanced” servers to make sure their customers won’t experience any downtime because of the reboots, upkeep phase or possible hardware failures. Additionally, PowWeb’s staff is supposed to be monitoring its servers round-the-clock, or so they claim. The visual design of PowWeb’s main website feels old-fashioned (almost in a good way), but its functionality is not an issue whatsoever. If you are curious about their products, you are free to look at a little presentation by selecting the “Take A Tour” option on the “Products” section. Although it isn’t anything mind-blowing, it does offer a good insight into all the features their products provide, making the final choice a bit easier for its potential users. To this day PowWeb has no official blog and their presence on social networks seem to have faded to non-existence. PowWeb makes decision-making rather simple, since it puts forward a “one plan-one price” model. It’s only shared hosting plan comes at a competitive price of $3.88 per month, but will cost you $11.95 upon renewal, which is considerably more. Even when we take into account every most welcome feature, the price hike is twice as high as you would expect by the industry average. PowWeb provides a 30-day money-back guarantee with its hosting plan, but it is valid with credit card payments only. If you’ve registered a new domain with PowWeb and are eager to keep it after seeking a refund, you’ll be able to do it only if you’ve paid a non-refundable domain additional fee. Otherwise, your domain will be lost to you. You are able to choose which currency (USD, EUR, GBP, CAD or AUD) you want to use to pay for PowWeb’s product and you can do it via a credit card or PayPal. Instead of offering its customers a few hosting plans to choose from, PowWeb proposes one plan to meet all of your needs. To achieve that goal, this plan includes many attractive features: free domain registration upon signup, unlimited disk space and scalable bandwidth, user-friendly and charge-free website builder and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
