Design Work 
PowWeb no more.
I originally signed up with PowWeb back in 2001. Back then, they were a small web hosting company that offered 200mb of space, 500mb month bandwidth, all for $7.77/month. This was a really good deal back in the day, but later on, I moved over to iPowerWeb, who seemed to be offering a better deal at the time. Only to move back to PowWeb when they started doing frequent upgrades at no extra cost to the customer. Many web hosts require that you pay an upgrade fee if you want to get the same package they’re offering new prospects. I experienced this when I was using Globat for my business website when I wanted to upgrade my package from their “Gigabyte” package to their “Terabyte” package which is their standard package now. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it, until PowWeb started upgrading all their existing clients for no extra charge. PowWeb also had pretty decent online customer service and tech support too. You could post any problems you have on their community forum, or you could simply log on to their IRC channel and ask your questions there. But soon, all things would come to a screeching halt.
As of April, of 2006. PowWeb was bought out by Endurance. Since the buy-out, service and support has been on a steady decline. Supposedly, because of the buy-out, they were going to “upgrade” the servers, by moving all hosting from one datacenter, to the ones Endurance ran. This caused no end to problems to many websites. Scripts were broken, web sites were loading much more slowly now, and if you wrote in to complain, tech support would open a ticket with a standard scripted response or say it was your fault and none of theirs that the web site isn’t working anymore.
If anyone has done any research on Endurance, they will notice a certain trend among most reviews. Before the buy-out, people were generally satisfied with their hosting, aside from minor issues here and there. After the buy-out, customers are greeted with non-responsive customer and tech support, slow servers, and sites that don’t work after the “migration”.
Needless to say, I wanted none of that.
When I was rebuilding this site, I came across a few issues, and needed to get in touch with their tech support. Their “live chat” support was pretty much useless. I was waiting for over an hour and still no response, other than an automated message telling me how important I am to them. We’ll, clearly I’m not important enough. Their email support was useless as well. All I got was a ticket was and told they will look into it.
So finally, I decided to jump the sinking ship that is PowWeb.
Currently, this site is hosted on DreamHost and I couldn’t be happier with the service, though, mind you, I haven’t encountered any issues yet that would require me to contact their customer service or tech support. Up-time for my other 2 sites, also hosted on this account, have been great. My space and bandwidth is increased weekly, my sites load in a reasonable amount of time, and the status site and media wiki have been helpful in solving all my issues so far. I can host unlimited domain names on my account and set up unlimited MySQL databases for my sites, and have more email accounts than I’d know what to do with.
All in all, a pretty good deal for my $7.95USD/month.
So the lesson in the end… never get hosting with a company run by Endurance.
