PowWeb‘s support sucks. I think even free web hosts have better support than PowWeb. Their support is a joke. A complete waste of time. I used their service and I can tell you how it is.

Their first level support is full of dumb people. Like I have to tell them what to do. They don’t know what “root” is. I mean like they don’t know where root is. I had to tell them where it was. I thought they were supposed to tell customers about stuff like that. Well its the opposite at PowWeb.

And their second support is just great! I was being sarcastic. They take forever to do the simplest things. They probably have like 10 people working on the second level to serve like a couple of thousand customers (5000 maybe). I think I know how to perfectly describe them. Monkeys which have been trained. I’m pretty sure trained monkeys could even do a better job than them.

Now their plan is great. 1.5 tb of space, 15 tb of bandwidth and 75 MySQL databases for $5.77/month. But their support really sucks. I don’t care how good the deal is. You need to provide customers with the kind of support they deserve.

So, I don’t recommend you using PowWeb unless you know that you’ll never need to contact support. And that’s like impossible, at least when you’re using PowWeb. By the way, they don’t use cPanel. They made their own ghetto control panel. That’s a nice way to save money.

There are few things that you should be aware of when you choose your web host. Whether its a free hosting service or a paid one. I think these are pretty important if you care about your site.

Paid Hosting

• See if your host is reliable. Ask a few people about their service. Or you could just Google the web host’s name with a few keyword and see what comes up. You’ll probably get a few blog posts and/or forum discussions about them.
• Keep in mind that you get what you paid for. If your host is giving you a great deal like 50gb of space, 100gb of bandwidth, etc and the price tag is only $3 per month. Then I think your host is overselling (its when you give people more than you can since most customers don’t use all of their resources). And they might not have a good service since their server is packed tight with a lot more users than it can handle. And if a host doesn’t make money how will they stay in business. That means that they might go out of business like a lot of web hosts. So, don’t always go with the cheapest. Look for the one which offers a reliable service at a reasonable price.
• Check if they are a reseller. A reseller is someone or a host which buys a reseller plan from another host and they use the other host’s resources to provide you a web hosting service. Pretty much like pretending to be a web host. Now they might give you a good deal but their service might not be reliable. And anyone with a few extra bucks to spare per month can be a reseller. And so they might not have a good support.
• See how long they have been in the business. So that the next morning you don’t wake up to find your site down and your web host gone. No refund or anything. They probably ran out of business or they ran away with your money.
• Check their Terms and Conditions of Service and their policies and shit. If they are overselling and you use up like 60-90% of your resources then they might close your account and give you some bullshit reason. Why? Because if you use all of your resources then there will be a shortage on the server. Since they rely on resources that have not been used by other customers.
• Good support? Check for that. You need a good reliable support. And before you actually buy one of their hosting plans go chat with the sales rep (if they have a live chat) or email them and see if they are nice and if they type in a formal way or like “ok. we;ll do dat. dont worry about that.” or like “Yes. Sure we can do that for you.”

Free Hosting

• See if they have support. Like even a support forum where the users pretty much help each other.
• I know a guy who had a pretty successful forum and the web host downloaded his database and forum files. And made a clone of his forum and redirected the traffic from the real forum to the clone. And he could have sold the forum database to people (yeah there are people who buy them).
• Reliable? Check for that. You don’t want your site to be down all the time.

So, that’s it for now. I might later make a list of good hosting deals. Both free and paid.

Haven’t we all had bad experiences with free web hosts? If you didn’t have a free web host and you are planning to get one then you could consider yourself lucky. I’ve had a lot of experience with free web hosts and I can help you choose one.

• Space

What are you planning to host? A site, a blog or a forum? This will help you determine how much space you will need. I would suggest having a minimum of 250 mb for a simple site or a small blog and at least 1 gb for a small forum.

• Bandwidth

What kind of traffic are you expecting? 1o, 50, 500 or 2000 visitors per month? You need to have an approximate idea of many visitors you will have per month, so that you know how much bandwidth you will need every month. You should have at least 5 gb of bandwidth if you are expecting a small amount of visitors. The more the visitors the more bandwidth you will need and it’s always good to have a little extra bandwidth than needed.

• Adverts

See if tfhey will put any kind of forced advertisements or pop-ups on your site. You do not want to go with a web host that puts any sort of advertisements. 60% of web hosts will put ads or pop-ups on your site and that is how they make money.

• Databases

You will need MySQL databases if you are planning to have a blog or a forum. If you are planning to have more than 1 blog or forum then you will need more than 1 database. Also check if they have a database size limit. You will not need a database if you are planning to host a simple HTML site.

• Domains & Subdomains

Check if the will allow you to use your domain with them or if you don’t have a domain and don’t plan on buying one then see if they provide a subdomain like you.freehost.com. If you plan on hosting multiple sites then check how many domains or subdomains they allow.

• PHP Functions

Do you have a contact form on your site or planning to have a forum? Then you will need PHP Sendmail enabled or else they won’t work. Blogs may also need it. It is always good to have PHP Sendmail Enabled. Most web hosts don’t have this enabled.

• Email Accounts

If you are planning to have an email address like you@domain.com then you have to check if they allow email accounts or not. About 50% of web hosts provide email accounts. And also think about how many accounts you would need and how many they provide.

• File Extensions

Are you planning to host files and let people people download them? Then you should check if they allow .zip or .rar or the type of extension your files have. If you plan on having a .htaccess then you should also check if they allow that and most free web hosts don’t allow it.

Am pretty sure this will help you choose a free web host and will also save you a lot of time. And also keep in mind that some free web hosts lie! Like I signed-up with free web host and later they were asking a certain amount to get stuff activated and to get the ads removed. It’s kind of like fishing.