By kobestarr on

Hi there

I’m looking at buying hosting with 1and1 as my friend recommended them, he develops sites in PHP though he doesn’t develop in Drupal. A few people on here seem to use them with a few problems but they seem to have documented them. I have a few noob questions

As a new drupal user and first time web designer are there any “showstopper” reasons for not using 1and1?

Should I get the linux or windows hosting and what is the difference?

Is there any major advantage of getting the 1&1 business over the home package? my site has a lot of mp3’s and will quite media intensive in the future…..

And any recommendations for an FTP client? My localhost is on Wampserver and im running windows xp. Thanks in advance!

K*

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

seanray’s picture

seanray commented

1and1 is not good at shared hosting and VPS hosting, it's quite slow for MySQL application. If you want 1and1 for Drupal, then I would like recommend you to try their server product, this is quite good, and I actually have one there.

If your site is new and the traffic is limited, you can start with a shared hosting first, you can try hostgator or bluehost, both work very well for Drupal, and not expensive.

Linux looks like the best fit for a Drupal site.

For FTP tool, you can use FileZilla, this is free and very powerful one.

Old Man’s picture

Old Man commented

I have three separate accounts with 1and1.com, and only experienced one outage when they were upgrading servers. It took them only a few minutes to fix it, but you do get long hold times with their customer service. I don't have a problem understanding non-english accents, but if you do you might have trouble understanding their customer service reps. 1and1 also works well and easily to add multiple Drupal installs on separate sub-domains. You are just going to have to read their FAQs and put in the right questions to figure out how to install Drupal the first time. 1and1 customer service wasn't much help, but all the information is in the FAQ's.

However, when I wanted to upgrade my hosting package to run an online store, dedicated IP and private SSL, etc., 1and1 gets very expensive. I am just now switching my store website to Hostgator, with a dedicated IP and private SSL it's about the same cost and the 1and1 account without those. And Hostgator seems to be MUCH faster than 1and1 ever was. However, I am having trouble adding multiple Drupal sites using cPanel with Hostgator - not as simple as adding a new sub-directory to your sites directory.

As far as Windows or Linux, unless you are using Frontpage extensions, go with the Linux account. I've had both and switched all three accounts to Linux. I don't remember what feature wasn't included with the Windows hosting, but I had to switch to Linux to get it to work - everything seems to work under the Linux hosting. There was no cost to switching, so you can always change your mind.

So, the short answer, there is no showstopper and Drupal runs just fine on 1and1 hosting plans. But get the Linux hosting. And if you think you want the business account rather than the basic account at 1and1, look at Hostgator, or Bluehost for cheaper packages and pretty darn good service.

kobestarr’s picture

kobestarr commented

Cheers for your input guys - much appreciated taking in the time to reply to me!

I have deceided to go with these guys www.webhost.uk.net/ as their pro linux server is much cheaper than 1and1 (after the free period) business that it is comparable to (interms of webspace anyway) and has a fixed IP address - though i dont know what this means but every tells me it is a good thing to have!

The main reason i went foer them is that they help you with drupal install - which as a as a newbie is a massive thing.

Also give you a writable php.ini file

Kobestarr

WebHostingForest’s picture

WebHostingForest commented

Glad to see that you have found the right one :)

fuzzyjared’s picture

fuzzyjared commented

can't recommend 1and1 shared hosting. You will quickly run into a php_memory issue with them, and there is no way to up that limit under the shared hosting service.

If you do run into this problem you may quickly find your self locked out of several important sections of your site.

sctech’s picture

sctech commented

I am currently reviewing shared hosting plans for a client. I have a couple of observations about 1&1 and Host Monster.

I have been reading through the 1& 1 terms and ran across this item.

"Due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 30M of memory to PHP via the memory_limit directive, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. While you may specify more than 30M for the memory_limit PHP directive via a php.ini or .htaccess file, the server will not allocate more than 30M."

As you should know, 30MB of memory just doesn't work well with all of the nifty module we like to use. Drupal 7 calls for a minimum of 32MB. I have always set my server's php.ini files at 64MB when on shared hosts.

For me this is deal killer. Who needs the hassle of the intermittent problems that this will cause.

I have read that Host Monster is placing limits on the database and table count. This can be verified with their CSR's. They are also said have a cpu cycle counter compiled in the Linux kernel and are able to time out your site if a request takes to long. When you read Host Monster's forum people are saying that they have received a 5 minute server time out using too many CPU cycles. Can you imagine your clients response losing their server for five minutes. I found some of this out yesterday when I had to transfer a clients beta site onto their preexisting account hosted at host monster. I will say that their CSR was outstanding.

In my opinion neither of these companies are a safe choice for a beginner. Too many hidden issues to troubleshoot.

As always, this is just to make you aware that you need really look thought the fine print before giving your business to a hosting firm.