bad reviews

I haven\'t tried them but after doing some searching, there are some really bad reviews out there, especially about billing practices and being unwilling to let domains go... go read http://forums.cnet.com/

A lot of features but limited database options

I've owned a 1and1 professional hosting account for about a year now and so have some experience of their services, features and support.

They are not the cheapest hosting company by a long way, but you do actually get what you pay for. This is compared to cheaper hosting companies where you buy a hosting package promising X amount of GB of storage and monthly bandwidth, but if you actually tried to use it you would be in trouble. In contrast you do get the space and monthly bandwidth you have paid for with 1and1 and are allowed to use it.

The custom control panel for 1and1 accounts is unique to them and not a customised version of cpanel as most other hosts use. Some dislike this custom control panel but I find it is perfectly fine for everything you need to do with your site. It has all tools and features you would expect from a web control panel, plus it has a lot of features you might not find on others including marketing tool for site map and search engine submissions. In addition it also includes a detailed webstatistics sections that details all of your traffic graphically, as well as being able to access the original server log files directly.

I also like the email and domain sections of the control panel as they are easily laid out, nice to use and logical. They make it very easy to setup a new domain, add subdomains, link domains or subdomains to specific directories within your webspace etc... and the email section is again easy to use to setup new accounts, as well as have webmail for every email account so you can access and use your email away from your main email client.

If there is one feature of the 1and1 control panel it is a lack of backup tools. Unless you have a dedicated server with them you will need to bak up you webspace manually using ftp. This is the one area I do prefer standard cpanel installs over this as that comes with a built in backup tool when you can make a complete gzipped backup of all or any part of the server. With 1and1 you cannot to this easily.

The higher up professional hosting package, as well as the dedicated servers to add SSH to the package allowing you to access the server directly which is a useful addition, but again I have seen SSH included with much cheaper packages from other hosting companies.

Now for Uptime. In the year I have had my 1and1 account my main website has not been offline or down once. This is in contrast to cheaper hosting companies where I have seen webspace go down at least once a month due to overloaded resources on a shared server. The reliability and uptime is a big plus point in 1and1's favour.

Now the one big negative aspect of 1and1. Limited database options. With all of their shared hosting packages you get a number of MySQL databases included. But each of these is limited to a maximum size of 100MB, which may be fine for a small CMS based site, is extremely limiting for a larger site. And if you added a forum into your site the database size would quickly fill the 100MB limit after a few months.

Also, on the shared hosting packages the databases are stored on a shared database server which is seperate from the webspace of your account. You have full access to the databases via phpmyadmin so can work on, backup and restore them easily. However I have encountered a problem with their shared database servers which is not good. Slowdown and restrictions.

I've found that the connection between the main shared hosting server and the shared database server can sometimes run very slowly. On some occasions I've waited a couple of minutes before a page would load which is not good.

The other limitation is restricted database use. My main Joomla powered site has a lot of traffic each day. Over 1000 unique visitors come to the site each day and it is common to have over 200,000 page views each month. As my site has grown it has added a lot more information into the database. This includes a large implementation of the jReviews component that now holds over 4000 entries. This has seen the database query load increase and in turn 1and1 complained that their database server could not cope with the load.

Obviously on a 1and1 dedicated server this isn't a problem as the database is hosted on the same server as the webspace and the server load is localised to your own server so no one else is affected.

So before you do sign up to a 1and1 account you do need to seriously think about the database requirements your site will need. If it is a small site then you will have no problems at all and it will happily work on a shared hosting plan. But if you have, or are planning, a large site that will draw in a lot of visitors and traffic, requiring a lot of database query requests, then the shared hosting packages database servers may not be able to handle it and 1and1 will get annoyed. In such cases a dedicated server will be recommended instead of a shared package.

Finally support. I've needed to use the 1and1 support a few times in the past year and so far it has been very good. I didn't give the customer support 10/10 because I have used other hosts with faster support, but in general if you email them directly you will get a reply and some action taken to help you within the same day.

I've had to use the support for a couple of reasons. The worst was a hack attack on my webspace with it being attacked three times in the space of a week. These attacks included gaining access to the webspace and installing spamming tools to use my server as a spam server, and hijacking the website. 1and1 customer suppot were very good when this happened. The notified me to this before I noticed it myself which was very good, and their administrators worked directly with me to fix the issues and get my site back up and running. Very good support.

Other reasons I've contacted them include slow database access, which again they looked into straight away and fixed.

They are also very fast at answering general queries about anything relating to your account.

The one downside of 1and1 is the price of their packages. But as I said above, you do get everything you have paid for and are actually allowed to use the space and bandwidth you have been given. In addition there are a lot of included features such as free domain names with shared packages and static IP addresses which you often have to pay extra or from other hosting companies.

So to sum up, of you need a reliable hosting company, with good support, a feature rich and easy to use control panel and hosting server 1and1 is recommended. Just take the database limitations into account when considering them as a host.