I have had nothing but problems with 1and1 as a shared hosting provider, so I decided to switch providers yet again. Hopefully the third time is the charm, and my new provider (Pair Networks) will be more reliable! Let me know if you experience any issues!
Sure. Here is why I didn’t care for 1and1:
1. They are unreliable, and the server that supported my domain had numerous extended outages. If you want to see for yourself, run my content-check.pl program against a domain they host.
2. Support was abysmal. As I mentioned in one of my other posts, the server that hosted my domain was throwing 500 internal server errors for 12-hours or so. I opened a support ticket to get this fixed, and they closed it 24- to 48-hours later stating my site was working fine.
3. Load averages on the server I was hosted on where typically 20 or more. Here is a snippet:
12:53:44 up 26 days, 18:39, 2 users, load average: 45.90, 28.15, 19.97
2 processes: 1 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 29.4% user, 4.9% system, 0.4% nice, 65.3% idle
Mem: 4150732K total, 3958808K used, 191924K free, 84728K buffers
Swap: 265064K total, 4132K used, 260932K free, 3197396K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1859 u4334784 18 2 2700 1476 1008 S N 0.0 0.0 0:00 bash
13566 u4334784 17 2 2008 944 756 R N 0.0 0.0 0:00 top
If you aren’t sensitive to downtime, they might be the right place for you and your friends. I rely on my website for work, so 12-hour outages are unacceptable in my book.
Ick. That’s pitiful. I can still vouch for their ded. servers (no problems in 2+ yrs), but I won’t be recommending their shared hosting any longer.
moo on January 5th, 2007
Care to share specifics about 1and1 problems? I have a dedicated server with them which is great. I have recommended their services (including shared hosting) to others in the past, but perhaps I shouldn’t. I’m curious what you found.