First, I have to admit. I’m a terrible customer. I’m a demanding perfectionist who rarely feels that he is getting his money’s worth. This is especially true of hosting providers. In the past four years, I’ve had to change providers at least six times because I felt that I was not getting what I paid for. This brief commentary is somewhat of a treat for me as I finally get to say something good about a hosting provider! A little over two years ago I was reading up on the latest technologies in one of my favorite publications, eWeek, when I ran across a nice, full-page ad from 1and1 offering an introductory offer of free hosting for three years. Wait! What! No way! This has got to be too good to be true! Off to the trusty computer I go. Sure enough, it was the real deal. 1and1 was indeed offering free web hosting for three years to introduce its new public sector hosting service. Well, like any good cash-strapped college student, I stepped right up and got me a piece of the pie. I’ve got to say, the pie was good too! After roughly two years of hosting with 1and1, with minimal problems I should say, I started to notice that I was getting dangerously close to the bandwidth allowance my free package had to offer.
No big surprise there; these things happen when you’re trying to establish an online presence and you offer free downloads. It was time to upgrade my hosting. At the time, there were no great specials going on at 1and1 so I decided to shop around. That was a tremendous mistake! What I got was a course in how *not* to run a hosting service. I will be polite, this time, and not name and companies, but let’s just say stay away from cheap reseller hosting accounts! The uptime is nowhere near what they promise and every time you turn around some idiot is running a script that bogs the server down to a crawl. After a couple months, a chunk of wasted cash, and several moves back and forth between providers, I finally conceded that 1and1 was indeed the best host I had come across thus far. As luck would have it, I had received an email from 1and1 announcing a great promotion for their free preview package holders (obvious marketing trick, but good timing in my situation). They were offering their top shared Linux package for half the price.
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