I have just completed my one-year trial of POW Web. The trial included purchasing domains and running three sites on my account, two of which ran on the blog platform wordpress. The busiest site, one of the blogs, ran cron jobs and received a high of 100 unique visitors per day. One site was a message board site that was somewhat under utilized, with the busiest day logging around 50 new comments/threads. I did not attempt any ecommerce, but given my findings from the other sites, this was hardly necessary.
I could do an itemized final review and list what POW Web does well along with what it doesn’t do well, but that would only serve to obscure the most important thing you need to know, which is that running a site on POW Web is a bad thing.
What you quickly discover is that site performance is extraordinarily erratic even with static pages and no traffic. I cannot tell you how many times I was the only person on a site, particularly during setup, when the servers would just spin their wheels trying to deliver a 20kb page. Needless to say, raise the level of processing complexity and add a bit of traffic and you will soon feel as though it is 1995 and you are trying to download a page of high-res photos on a first generation phone modem. Furthermore, sites tended to lose contact with their databases at various times throughout the day.
So in the end, for POW Web the question really doesn’t come down to a matter of checking off a list of positives versus negatives because the simple act of serving up web pages is simply too much for them, and so there you go; the inability to perform the most basic function you need from a web host pretty much rules them out.
I have closed all accounts with this company and would need some very compelling reasons to give them another try. If you are looking for good shared hosting, I would recommend anyone else so long as they are a reputable company with solid business practices. Specifically, though, I would recommend HostGator, my choice for best shared hosting.
