Affordable Web Hosting
These days a credible business must have a credible web presence. Hiring a web designer is expensive. Can a new business defer the expense of customized web design? It's possible, even if the entrepreneur has only modest to moderate computer skills, by using a shared hosting service and packaged templates and applications.
This writer selected 1and1 about one year ago. Following is a review of this low cost, popular web hosting service.
1&1 Web Hosting Business Package
1&1.com offers an entry level web hosting package for small business. Shared hosting on a Linux server costs $9.99 per month.
This user's experience is that 1&1 is highly reliable. The combination of low cost, reliability, and broad features, make 1&1 a good choice for a start-up or small business web presence.
Customers are billed in three month increments and with the current sign-up incentive, you can establish your web presence for only $15.
Features of 1&1's Business Package
A sampling of the features in your 1&1 business package include:
- 3 domains, with private registration and 200 subdomains
- The ability to host 100 domains
- 250GB of web space with 2,500 GB of monthly transfer volume
- 25 FTP accounts
- 2,500 email accounts with 2 GB of mailbox space
- 1&1's Webmail product with Spam filter
- 50 MySQL databases
- A series of web building applications
- Marketing tools
- 5 blogs
- Security tools, including a firewall and daily backups
- 24/7 phone and email support
- 90 day money back guarantee
Limitations
In my one-year experience, here are some limitations to 1&1's entry level business account:
- 1&1 WebsiteBuilder's large array of templates for easy web start-up include the basics for a web presence, but have an 18 page limit.
- You cannot modify templates, nor add unique html code without purchasing an upgrade Plus product at an additional $10/month.
- Though forms, maps, forum hosting, and a WYSIWYG text editor are included, the WebsiteBuilder lacks a shopping cart or the ability to include custom html which would support a purchasing system such as PayPal. This is a significant limitation for the start-up business. Support advises a work-around of setting up a custom page for purchases; however, that page would not include the look and feel of the remainder of the site.
- Web statistics are available each day after midnight for the preceding day or user-selectable period. This writer finds the statistics package grossly inflates page views when compared to Google analytics.
- The statistics package fails to provide search terms that brought visitors to your site.
- The 1&1 Blog application is a scaled down version of Wordpress, the open source blogging application. Though you get the advantage of an installed and ready to use blog product, you lose much of the flexibility of Wordpress.
- Support is available with little or no wait in this writer's experience. As is generally true throughout the industry, quality varies widely. Support personnel have always been polite and sincere, but some lacked the skill to handle non-routine problems. English language skills ranged from excellent to barely understandable.
Options for Overcoming Limitations
The large space allotted to your package allows you to overcome the limitations of 1&1's application packages by adding packages such as the full Wordpress blog software, the POMMO mail list manager package, and the AWSTATS statistics package, all free, open source, and supported products.
The downside of this option is that you become the application administrator.
A Good Value, an Affordable Web Host
1&1.com merits your consideration as a web hosting site with it's combination of low entry cost and broad feature set. Even with its limitations, 1&1 is still a good value.
