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 Review by state 
UPDATED: 2.1 years ago
member for 7.7 years, 4024 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Hampton,Hampton City,VA
 $19 per month (3 month contract)
 about 1 days
 "Loads of disk space and bandwidth, screaming fast connections"
 "Horrible technical support, control panel needs some improvement"
 "Server good. Tech support bad. Recommend for more experienced users"
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Setup experience:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
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I've got the Developer Package ( »order.1and1.com/xml/order/HostingDev ) which is on a shared server. Server response time is very fast, loads of bandwidth and disk storage.
When I signed up they were offering 20GB of storage and 750GB of transfer, just a few days ago the offering on their website jumped to 30GB/1.5TB of transfer (as well as other things increasing). A call to tech support revealved that they would be upgrading my account as well.
Tech support has some (read: lots of) room for improvement, responses to emails take days for a response so calling them is the best solution if you have questions. I've spoken with them several times on the phone, hold times vary. Worst hold time thus far has been about twenty minutes.
I have experienced some issues that may be deal breakers for folks thinking about signing up for service with 1&1, these are not posted in their site FAQ and I didn't discover them until I was already signed up and did some google searches. They may or may not be a big deal for you...for a "shared" server it's give and take, and I think I've decided to live with them because of other package benefits.
So, here are some things I've noticed:
Control Panel: It's a bit sluggish at times and is certainly not what I would call full-featured. If you have some command-line knowledge you can configure by hand whats lacking there. Not a big deal for me, but for someone just starting out or more inexperienced it may leave you baffed.
Backups: No automated backup process. Better get familiar with tar, gzip and mysqldump if you want backups of your webspace. The more expensive (dedicated) packages include backup and at a modest fee ($40/month) you can backup the entire box to one of their backup servers.
Nameserver Bullies: If you have your own nameservers, don't get used to keeping them as the primary for your domain. I have third-party nameservers but in order to use the 1and1 service with my domain, I had to change the nameservers with my registrar. Got an email just three days ago saying they would remove my domain if action wasn't taken by Dec 4th. Once they are authoritative, you can point back to your own nameservers, but they want their name listed in your whois record...
Domain Manager: The control panel application called Domain Manager is the only way to add/delete/modify the domains associated with your account and it can take quite a bit of time for changes to take effect. Adding a subdomain will take a minimum of ten minutes to "go live", in my experience it's closer to half an hour. Deleting a subdomain will take at least three hours. This is very annoying.
Unlike the common cpanel type subdomain creations, you actually have the option to specify the target directory for domains and subdomains..they can exist *anywhere* in your directory structure and subdomain.domain.com doesn't have to live in /home/domain/www/subdomain. This is a really nice feature...took a bit of mucking around to get it just right but I like it.
Webserver Stats: No out of the box Awstats, Webalizer or Analog stats. If you install them yourself, you'll need to modify the config (if possible..I did with AWStats) or source code and recompile (as I did with Webalizer) for them to report correctly because of the custom apache log files. The built-in stats are ok, but cumbersome to navigate through if you're looking for a quick snapshot of whats happening. Once you get it configured it's smooth running. You can PM me if you'd like help with that.
IP Address: With a shared server package, there is no dedicated IP address allocated to your vhost, nor an option to purchase one (as far as I can tell). When I originally signed up and was issued an address I paniced because the address was allocated to RIPE and registered in Germany. After a phone call to suport I was informed that the address space was portable and the server was located in their NYC datacenter. Big plus, very low ping times.
So what's the bottom line? Well, if you're ok with the above points, familiar with the linux CLI and don't need tech support on a daily or weekly basis then you'll do alright....it just depends on how much you want/need to get out of your host. The big selling point for me was the disk storage, bandwidth and peppy server response time. I think I'll be happy here.
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