[hosting] Powweb became crap ?

[ManuTOO]

Hello,

I have been using Powweb hosting for more than 2 years now, and I was quite happy with their service so far (very cheap with huge B/W).

A few months ago, Endurance bought Powweb, and they began to migrate accounts to their new platform.
I postponed the migration as much as possible, but now, the legacy platform will be closed on next August 31st.
So today, I began the migration process, and when I looked the result on the new platform through their proxy, it was damn slow. So I went to have a look at Powweb forum, and there I found several topics with people complaining about the slowness of the new platform...
Some Endurance staff made several answers like it was only a very small portion of their customers which has such problems, and they didn't know why (woh, great support )...

Anyway, right now, I didn't finish my site migration, and decided to wait a couple of weeks more.

I guess Powweb was pretty popular amongst Indie Developers, so I wonder if there's any of their customers from their "large portion without trouble" reading this forum, and who could tell me his site is working nicely on the new platform .....?

Or should I prepare myself to move to a new host ? (and lose 1 year of hosting at Powweb, but it's better to lose $77 than thousand of dollars in the following months... )

[jwc]

as far as I know they refund your unused months.

anyway powweb was always quite amateurish, I couldn't really think someone running a online business to go with anything less than a VPS (a dedicated server would be much better of course). I mean, what you can expect for 7$/month ?!

[Frozen In Ice]

It's the old saying, you get what you pay for, eventually. I'd be happy to save the bucks and choose a cheap host similiar to what you have mentioned and even tried one. Nothing but headaches, unreliability, security problems, and the list goes on. I'll stick with the more expensive host. I'm quite happy where I am and the tech support is as professional as it can get. Granted, the more expensive price will cut into the bottom line, but so does a cheap host that goes offline, extremely slow transfer rates (probably throttled as they have so many sites per server) and other problems that your potential customer will experience when accessing your site.

[berserker]

I use them only as download mirror. I have to go dedicated server way but I just don't have time to go through all the hassle of moving to new server

[berserker]

Speaking of shared hosters I must admit I use OnSmart.net for more than a year and was very happy with them until recently - downtimes, errors and other stupid things started to happen pretty often. They even disabled some of my scripts for some reason until I contacted them.

[ggambett]

Originally Posted by ManuTOO

I wonder if there's any of their customers from their "large portion without trouble" reading this forum, and who could tell me his site is working nicely on the new platform .....?

That would be me... the migration process was painless, the site comparison tool complained about a few pages which had random content and therefore did different results in the old and new platform (just because they got two different runs of the RNG), and the site continues to work perfectly. I've had very little trouble with PowWeb in the past 3 years.

[Travis Dorschel]

I used to host www.livingdesktops.com on powweb until the migration made the site take over 30 seconds to load. I moved the site to my VPS and changed the domain pointers. I am going to wait and see if it gets any better and I may move the site back before I decide to close my account. Some in the powweb forums said the slowness was just a west coast thing. It still makes me mad but luckily I had a VPS to use. I highly recommend having more than one server that you can switch to so you can avoid these problems.

[Surrealix]

Originally Posted by ManuTOO

so I wonder if there's any of their customers from their "large portion without trouble" reading this forum, and who could tell me his site is working nicely on the new platform .....?

This would cover me as well, although the migration was a real headache. My site's running fine, now, and there seems to be little to complain about now that it's working.

But.

After migrating, not only were a number of my scripts broken, but all the file associations had been wiped, my email account wiped, and new mail just vanished for a week (didn't even bounce), causing me a lot of anguish before I found the problem. The 'support' is dead useless for any significant problems - they told me to try doing a number of things, all of which I'd stated I'd already done. Site mapping, such as subdomains were all broken, and various other things went wrong.

Luckily (for me, anyway) so many other people had these problems that the comunity forums had enough answers that I could fix everything. It wasted a lot of time.

Overall, the migration was a right pain, but I'll probably still stick with powweb, as long as everything keeps working fine ...

[Pogacha]

Hi ManuTOO,
I'm not with them ... When I signed I got placed directly into the new platform and I have some problems.
Mails delays: from 10 minutes to 2 hours.
Off time: A lot, I cannot compute it really but in 2 month I have more than 5 hours.
Awstat doesn't work. I try to get an answer about and they didn't response.
I suspect that the bandwidth some times drops down but I'm not sure.
I had some php config problems too.
I was waiting them to estabilize the platform but now I'm seriusly thinking about moving.
I'll try to talk again with them and I hope to have an answer.

Edit:
I just check the site problems again and now Awstat is working, php config problems are a lot less (I have to check the rest) and speed is fine. I'll give them a chance so.

[Sybixsus]

I did lose some emails during migration. I may have exacerbated this by turning off the catch-all address right in the middle of migration to stop an absolute deluge of spam ( 100's of emails per minute ) so I can't really be 100% sure if the migration was the only problem. Probably was though.

I haven't noticed anything else yet. Speed is still good, although it was slow for a day or two during the migration. Actually, that's not true. The majority of the site was fine, but the forum was dog slow. Not sure why, because the entire site is now PHP and MySQL, not just the forum. Anyway, everything is back to normal speed again now.

[ManuTOO]

Thanks for all theses answers !
I got an email notification for the 1st one, came to read it on the site, and never got anymore notification... :-S

jwc > I mean, what you can expect for 7$/month ?!

400 GB / month of BW, 20 GB of storage, PHP w/Imap, MySQL, Cronjob, less than 1% downtime, a couple of glitches per year, email grey-list & antivirus, a forum with many answers, etc, etc...

As I said in my 1st post, I'm on Powweb since more than 2 years now, and I'm more than pleased by their services. Last time I checked hosting services (about 1 year ago), most were more expensive for less services, very great...

ggambett, Surrealix Sybixsus :
Thanks for your answers, it gives me hope !
I'll wait till end of month, and pray that most issues will be resolved by then...

I already began the transfer and tested my site on the new platform, and it seemt almost everything was working fine (mail form, forum, dowload script, etc...), except a PHP script to read my IMAP mail box :-S

Pogacha > Mails delays: from 10 minutes to 2 hours
It's probably coz of the email grey-listing. You can turn it off if you want. (it's to prevent most virus, coz they send themselves only once)

[tentons]

I use Powweb, too, and the migration went without a hitch. I didn't lose any data, and I didn't notice any differences or down time. Service has been very good the whole couple years I've used Powweb.