Tuesday, April 3, 2007

1and1 Web Host Review

1and1 Web Hosting Review
Choosing a web host can be a daunting task for any website owner or web publisher. With hundreds of hosts to choose from (maybe even thousands), how do you narrow the field down to a reliable host that charges the least amount of money? 4 years or so ago, a new player entered into the USA web hosting arena. That company is 1and1 web hosting. 1and1 landed in North America running, with aggressive advertising campaigns in offline print magazines and with online advertising.

Three full years of free web hosting, for real?
When they first entered the North American market, they started off with a bang by offering 3 FREE YEARS of web hosting. Skeptical? I was too until I signed up and got my 3 free years of hosting. After that, I've stayed on with 1and1 due to their excellent products, pricing and server stability.

Website Availability Monitoring Results
Last year, a friend and I were hosting numerous websites on various web hosts and we decided to setup URL monitoring for all of our sites. If a site was ever unavailable or down, we would receive an email notification to let us know that there was a problem. We were monitoring sites hosted by 1and1, GoDaddy and DreamHost. The results? After about 6 months of monitoring, the 1and1 sites had the LEAST amount of monitoring alerts, followed closely by GoDaddy. DreamHost came in last place, with the greatest amount of unavailable alerts. What does this tell me? 1and1 is the most reliable.

Traffic surges
But what about traffic surges caused by social news sites such as Digg, Slashdot, Fark or others? I am happy to report that my 1and1 hosted sites have stood up very well to very large traffic surges being sent from the front page of Digg, Slashdot and others. I have only noticed one problem with my first digg frontpage hit, where a site produced a server error on some requests, but a page refresh was able to fix the issue and serve up the page. The next time my site hit the Digg front page, I saw no problems. I also had no issues when my site was linked from SlashDot.org, a tech news site that will send thousands and thousands of visitors.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I have absolutely no trouble in giving 1and1 web hosting my highest recommendation. I am currently on the cheapest plan, paying less than $3 per month and hosting approximately 10 websites. Do you want a more reliable web host with more features? If so, try out 1and1 web hosting.

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