Powweb forum
Powweb‘s forum has a lot of posts and is very well structured. There are a couple of different mods like Doc C, IanS, and CrocHunter. The forum is rather strict as you have to get about 30 posts under your belt before you can add a signature and sometimes posts are deleted without warning. In addition a reputation system with points is implemented at this forum. For new customers there is a heplful pre-sales section where you can ask any questions you may have left before sign up
By and large, there is a very constructive and knowledgeable crowd present and you will get replies to your questions pretty quickly. One member who is always pretty willing to give newbies a hand is Yvette.
Go to Powweb
August 15th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Back in June 2005, I signed up for Powweb. I left 3 months later. Not because the service provided was bad, but because I had figured out how to host my web site from home using my DSL connection.
I recently started to search for a web host company, because I’ve decided to stop self-hosting. Because of my “OK†experience with Powweb, they were the “company to beat†in searching for a hosting company. I had asked a reseller question on the forum back in January 2007, and the responses were polite, if not somewhat confusing.
Anyway, over the past month or so, I had been doing a lot of research and monitoring of hosting company forums, trying to decide which one gets my money. During this research, I noticed a disturbing trend on the Powweb forum. The moderators appeared to be overly oppressive when it came to members criticizing Powweb. Because of this, Powweb went from being on the top of my prospects to being completely dropped from consideration.
This past Sunday, I saw a thread on the forum titled “Closing threads that are critical of powwebâ€. So, I took a look, and it fit right in with what I had already concluded. Trying to provide some constructive criticism to the moderators, I posted to the thread my obervations as a former customer, and that the moderators might want to consider the signal they are sending to potential customers.
This post prompted an arrogant, condescending reply from the moderator “Doc Câ€. I responded to his post, by calmly trying to explain and defend my post. This post was blocked for over an hour, and was only released after I called Powweb support to file a formal complaint. When it was finally released, I was then attacked by another moderator, “IanSâ€. I offered another post in defense, and was attacked by IanS again. At this point, it occured to me that this was extremely odd behavior by the moderators, so I stopped posting anything. I was absolutely stunned by what followed. Doc C and IanS made a couple of posts intimating that they, as moderators, were not above inflaming a thread for amusement.
If that wasn’t enough, IanS further tried to taunt me into another post by doing something that I’ve never seen a moderator do on any forum I have ever visited. This moderator posted that the thread would be closed in about 10 hours, so if anyone wanted to make any more comments, do so before then.
I waited until the thread was closed, and on Monday morning I called the Endurance main office. I reaffirmed my desire to follow through on my formal complaint on both Doc C and IanS, letting Endurance CS know, in no uncertain terms, that these moderators are juvenile, unprofessional, and projecting a very negative image for Powweb.
The thread can be found here…
http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?s=22c133493e2bfa975502ef3990c6ccf6&t=75564
Powweb is the most unprofessional web hosting company in existence today. They won’t be around much longer with the image they and their moderators are projecting to the world, not to mention the current “support” train wreck Powweb is experiencing as I type. May they go belly-up in bankruptcy soon!
wolleybus
August 16th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Thanks for sharing your story here WolleyBus. I must say quit hanging out in the Powweb forums a while ago and part of the reason was the constant deletion of threads. Powweb has had some difficulties recently with it’s MySQL servers but instead of proactively tackling the problem the forum mods seem to resort to deleting inconvenient threads.
I read that thread you posted and I couldn’t see that your behavior was rude. To me it looks like they were just not going to take any valid criticism whatsoever and it really shows in this thread.
At the moment the three linux hosts which are the best comparable option to Powweb in my opinion would be Hostgator, Hostican, Lunarpages.
“Powweb is the most unprofessional web hosting company in existence today.” BTW, I think that’s Dreamhost.