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1&1 Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| A good bargain for two domains and great tools; outsourced support is average | |
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1&1's Home package is a good bargain with its two-year plan. Hosting will run you $6.99 per month, with the first six months at $3.49. There is a $4.99 set-up charge, but given that 1&1 gives you two lifetime domain registrations with free domain privacy, we find it easy to overlook this one-time charge. 1&1 offers a great user interface with an easy site builder. A bonus for some will be 1&1's commitment to green hosting through its purchase of renewable energy. 1&1's WebiteBuilder is one of the smoothest and most intuitive site builders you're likely to find. There's a basic free version included with the plan that allows you to build a 12-page site. A more robust version is available for $9.99 per month, but we think most users will be satisfied with the free version. It's a truly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) site constructor; click on a graphic or a piece of text you want to edit and you'll immediately be able to make changes. The website creator is so fully-featured that it feels (and looks) much more like a program on your PC than it does a web application. So you'll have plenty of options, though you will spend a bit of time learning how they all fit together. As a site creator, it's one of the top options available, right up there with Yahoo! and Hostgator. For the most part, 1&1 impressed us because it works so well in its own cohesive 1&1 universe. 1&1 does not offer a collection of third-party add-ons, but an integrated management environment (so much so that the Wordpress blogging app is not called Wordpress, but the 1&1 blog). While not as step-by-step intuitive as Yahoo! Small Business, it's very well thought-out. While there's a slight learning curve, it all makes sense, much more so than the piecemeal approach of other web hosts. 1&1 offers 24/7 support by phone and email. Though the lines were answered rather quickly, the quality and friendliness of the outsourced support varied the three times we called. While the support personnel were patient, the quality was not up to what we've encountered with other web hosts like Yahoo!, FatCow, or HostMonster. You get one option for building a store with 1&1, but it's a good one, at least in terms of ease-of-use. There's a free version, which is scaled down and does not include PayPal integration and a few other features, or you can pay $9.99 per month for a more fully fleshed out option. We found the free option to be very easy to use. Best of all, it works just like every other component available from 1&1. If you've already designed your site using their site builder, eZShop will be very familiar. On the downside, the design side is a little slow, but the process is so intuitive that we don't consider it a big strike. For all these great features there are some problems. The add-ons can be a bit sluggish, but the features are nice enough that we don't mind. We're also not thrilled that 1&1 wants to create every component at a subdomain, instead of at a directory on the main domain. It's a small issue, but potential users should be aware that if they want to use multiple modules such as a gallery, blog, and a SiteBuilder site, they will have to be done on multiple subdomains, something easily done, but a little inconvenient. 1&1 is one web host we've had to reevaluate since we started our testing. Our initial experiences with them indicated poor reliability, but our four-month test period has shown a virtual uptime of 100% (which translates to a mere four minutes of downtime). Data outside that period has also shown the same rock-solid uptime. Its server response time isn't shabby either, coming in at .453 seconds, faster than the .518s average. The average download time of our 77MB file was 1 minute 22 seconds, better than the group average of 1 minute 47 seconds. One other minor caveat: 1&1 puts monetized error pages on your site by default. They're easy to turn off, and 1&1 is transparent about this, letting you know all about them in the sign-up letter. We wish we'd turned them off in the beginning as they did cause confusion for us, since 1&1 actually places its own index.html page in your web directory. 1&1 does give you a 90-day money back guarantee, a pretty lengthy period of time to make your decision. We were hoping to give 1&1 an unqualified recommendation as it really excels with its user interface and the price for two domains cannot be beat. The support quality is definitely something to consider, but other than that it's not a bad deal. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $3.49/mo for 6 mos; $6.99/mo thereafter |
| 1 Year Plan: | $62.88/yr; $6.99/mo (50% off first 6 mos) |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 90-day full refund, not prorated after; $7.98 domain charge |
| Domain: | 2 free for life |
| Support: | Phone, Email |
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