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1&1 Web Hosting Review: Web Hosting |
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| Great hosting package that is a good bargain and has great tools; outsourced support is average | ||||||||||||||||
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1&1's Unlimited plan is the best value 1&1 offers for personal or small business websites. It offers unlimited storage space and monthly traffic volume for your site, as well as a whole host of other options that will help you customize your site.
1&1 also offers a great user interface, free domain privacy, and an easy site builder. A bonus for some will be 1&1's commitment to green hosting through its purchase of renewable energy credits. They do charge a $4.99 set-up fee. Features 1&1's WebsiteBuilder 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. Interface 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. 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. 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. E-commerce 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. Performance From a performance standpoint, 1x1 does rather well in all departments, but is particularly notable for its uptime. See the chart below for details. For uptime, higher percentages are better. For all others, lower numbers indicate better performance. 1x1 Web Hosting test data:
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| Cheapest Price: | Unlimited plan: $6.99/mo 3 months free hosting |
| Storage/Data Transfer: | Unlimited |
| Money-Back Guarantee: | 90 days |
| Domain: | 1 free |
| Support: | Phone, Email |
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