1and1

I’ve been a customer of 1&1 for several years, mainly because it’s too difficult to swap hosts with so many sites to manage and the pricing has been good. I began by using the best of their shared platform, which I felt to be of poor value given the performance problems I suffered on even smaller sites. MySQL database performance was a particularly common issue on those.

Later I swapped to a dedicated server, which gave a good improvement but still had problems. For example, while most hosts offer MySQL5 databases, at the time of writing 1&1 has still not managed to upgrade my package to support them, thus seriously limiting what modern scripts you can adopt; it doesn’t even offer MySQL 4.1.

However while mediocre hosting performance is not uncommon at lower price points, customer support has been the weakest aspect. Support response times to e-mail messages can range from 4/6 hours to several days, though it has recently improved. When you do get a reply then they often seem unable to cope with more complex questions, frequently responding with answers that either conflict with other information the host has given or relate to completely different matters.

Generally speaking, 1&1 isn't a truly terrible host and I’ve been with far worse. So long as customer support isn’t a concern and you’re buying a dedicated server then they’re not bad but I wouldn’t recommend the shared hosting packages.