1and1 UK Review

About 1&1

1&1 claims to be the world’s biggest web hosting company.  With more than 2.5 million active websites and 10 million registered domains linking to their servers, the company has a user base of 8 million people, increasing with about 2,500 new customers every day.

Founded 1998, 1&1 was founded in Germany and is ultimately owned by a German company.

The UK base is in Slough, with other centres in Europe, the Philippines and the US.

Products and Services

If you want it, then it’s likely 1&1 has the product or service in one of their packages.

Shared Hosting caters from newbies to small businesses and online shops.  Several plans are aimed at e-commerce and eBay traders with turnkey web sites that are ready to trade.

Resellers can set up Virtual Servers and enterprise businesses and other large volume users can pick from several Dedicated Hosting deals. Server technology offers both Linux and Windows operating systems.

Add-ons for Windows users include MS Exchange for email management and SharePoint for collaborative working.

1&1 tends to offer own-badged software applications rather than the Open Source libraries that include programs like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. For instance, 1&1 offers an own-badged product instead of MySQL in some packages.

The marketing plans are designed to niche the market and encourage spending on add-ons rather than flat-rate all-in hosting plans offered by many other providers.

Benefits of Using 1and1

As any user would expect from one of the world’s leading web hosts, 1&1 has flat rate hosting plans all with unlimited transfer caps.

The company is constantly running discounts, new offer packages and cut-price dedicated server options.

Users should consider a checklist of the products and services they want for their web presence and then try to match that to the nearest 1&1 offer.

The mix-n-match plans run in to dozens of options

Services for either operating system include blogging, photo galleries, streaming media, and chat channels.

The main thrust of the company’s marketing is to target online stores and small businesses and many of the products and services are specifically aimed at this target market.

Reliability and Performance

1&1 gives a 99.99% up-time guarantee and 60-day money back guarantee. If your domain unexpectedly exceeds traffic allowances that are set in your hosting package, 1&1 does not restrict traffic but charges a 99p per gigabyte of unauthorised traffic surcharge to your monthly account.

Customer Service and Support

1&1 offers a wide ranging support online and offline support system:

• 24/7 email ticket support
• 24/7 account and technical support by telephone that also includes ‘Netviewer’ a remote access application that lets support staff help users configure a web site through the domain control panel
• Online searchable knowledge base and FAQ

Web Hosting Features

1&1 has recently opened a fourth £15 million data centre built to the company’s own specification. 1&1 owns and manages the data centres.

The company’s combined data capacity is built around 65,000 web and email servers connected by Cisco and Juniper routers and hardware. The company has a 130 Gigabyte backbone connection and handles 1,000 terabytes of web traffic every month.

1&1 sits at the top of the internet tree with specialist relationships as a Microsoft Joint Development Partner and with Google, Plesk, Symantec and HP.