Goodbye 1and1 Hosting, Hello Hostgator
One of my most popular articles on this site, as well as one of the articles that brings in the most search engine visitors, is my How to Install Wordpress with 1and1 Hosting article. I believe the reason for this is because there are many people who’ve run into the same problem trying to get Wordpress to connect to the database on 1and1’s servers. 1and1 doesn’t like to play by the standard rules.
1and1 is not only the most well-known web host, but they’ve also served my website quite well. As my site has grown, not to mention the fact that I now have multiple websites, my needs are changing. This post is not to bash 1and1, because they have provided me with good service. But I believe Hostgator has a set-up that will better meet my needs. Read on to find out why.
Why Hostgator?
I’ve chosen to go with Hostgator for several reasons. At the top of that list, is the great reputation they’ve built for themselves. Unlike 1and1, I’ve found much more praise of Hostgator on the net than bashing. Another reason is that I found their reseller accounts very attractive. These accounts cost a little more than your run of the mill hosting plans, but I think this is the perfect set-up for someone with multiple websites. Having a different account for each site should eliminate all my sites going down if only one site were to take more than it’s share of bandwidth. Unlimited MySQL databases is also a big factor in my decision, as my 1and1 plan limited me to 50 databases. Unlimited databases will allow me to continue building BANS sites, as well as any other type of database-driven sites I want to build in the future.
Hostgator Points to Consider
- Great Reputation
- Great Customer Service
- Affordable Reseller Accounts
- Unlimited Databases
- Uses standard C Panel admin
Support
I’ve seen a lot of 1and1 bashing on the net, and apparently that is due to their “horrible customer service”, which I don’t have any experience with personally. I’ve been with 1and1 for over two years, and have never had to contact their tech support. So, that could either mean that I’ve been lucky, or that there hosting service works like it’s supposed to. As Forrest Gump would say, “that’s all I have to say ’bout that”.
My initial impression of support from Hostgator has been well beyond my expectations. They will move up to 30 websites for you from your previous web host to the Hostgator servers. I understood this to be somewhat automated between web host’s using C Panel. 1and1 has their own non-standard control panel, so I didn’t think this would apply to me. Boy, was I wrong! They manually moved close to twenty websites for me(databases included), and it didn’t cost me any extra! I’m truly impressed with the level of customer service that I’ve received so far. Great communication and great service.
The transition went really smooth. I think I may have lost a couple of new comments between the two servers during the change, so for that I apologize.
Anthony,
I have to agree that 1 & 1’s customer service has been, in the past, awful. The last time I called them, a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised that they actually were able to help me, and pretty quickly; so maybe that is improving.
Hopefully they are improving. It’s bad when you have these huge companies with poor customer service.
Well, I wish you luck at HostGator, but I will continue to stay with 1and1. THey have always worked out nicely for my site and I have been happy with the support.
I think big guys probably just get trashed more just because they have a lot more customers.
Good luck!
Kate
Thanks Kate. That’s a good point about the big guys getting trashed more…….1&1 having millions of customers would probably generate more unhappy people than a smaller company. Like I said, I wasn’t unhappy with what I was getting from 1&1….as a matter of fact, I was quite pleased. I just think that the package I now have with Hostgator is going to meet my current needs better.
I’ve actually been running Hostgator on some of my sites since last October and I couldn’t be happier with them. I’ve rarely run into any technical issues and when I have support has always answered my questions very quickly. I also love their chat support because I can chat with a support rep at almost anytime as well.
I wish you good luck with them as well.
Hey Clarke,
Yeah, I used the chat support briefly to figure out a couple of things, and it was fast and easy to use. If all the good things I’ve read about Hostgator are true, I look forward to a long working relationship with them.
By the way, how was Florida?
We had a great time in Florida the hotel was on the beach so I spent a lot of time there. We did a lot of other cool things as well.
As soon as I get caught up I’m going to write up a long post on it.
Sounds like fun….look forward to reading about it.
1and1.com is one of the worst hosting companies. My server has been down for over 34 hours and they have not sent any communication at all. I had to talk to 4 people before they would tell me what the problem was. That was about 10 hours ago. No word since then.
That isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with 1and1 either.
Filed complaint with BBB.
I have been a customer for 2 plus years with 1and1 hosting 5 of my sites. In that 2 years they have had 3 major outages that lasted 24plus hours. The last straw was on 4/29/08 when my site/customers experience intermittent downtime which lasted until 5/13/08 when my sites were COMPLETELY down for 5 days. On 5/19 they came back up but have been experiencing intermittent downtime ever since. On 5/21 I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau since their customer relations department was unwilling to communicate with me. A company should not be allowed to operate this way.
Josh and Steve T - Thanks for sharing your experiences. I know I have read quite a few horror stories about 1and1. That wasn’t my experience, but as stated, I never have contacted them for support. Hopefully, they’ll get their act together.
First off mad props to you from your themes.So 1on1 well 6 months ago I didn’t know anything about a blog.I ordered the two free domains.The backend is awesome the tools easy to use,a few times that I called support for mistakes that I made they answered right away,first ring style.The person in India obviously was polite intelligent in fact they helped me with putting my wordpress blog on it’s own domain name.They didn’t have to do that.The letter the send a while later with suggestions is alot of help.Summiting your blog is easy.Maybe I’m biased cause I make a lot from affiliate orders:)Got another 20 I just noticed.Anyway I just wanted to stop in and let you know that I appreciate your work Peace
Thanks John. I agree, that 1and1’s admin area is nice and easy to use.
While the 1and1 admin pages may be well laid out, I find there performance to be lacking in the extreme. This may be singular to my account, a managed server package, but it generally takes 20-30 seconds for each page load while administrating. Since My account holds 120+ domains, 250+ email addresses, and 60+ live sites, you imagine how tedious it is to work with.
To continue my tirade, a few months ago they upgraded linux on my server. I have had serious and crippling performance issues ever since. On three occasions, all of my PHP sites have simply ceased operating, failing silently and displaying a white screen. I was told that I should “use PHP5 instead of 4″ to alleviate the server load. I am required to use htaccess hacks in every site folder to make this happen, since they have chosen to keep the PHP4 processor the default, defying all logic.
The webmail system is also abysmal, slow, and poorly featured. I have emails dating back to 2005 in which support personnel promise that changes are being made to the webmail system. To date nothing has happened.
In my case, 1and1 was and is a total failure, and I am anxious to be rid of them.
Hi, Anthony. Thanks for writing the article “how to install wordpress on 1&1.” Your article was on top of the page when I googled the topic. I also read the comments below it, and wow, there were lots of gratitude flowing here and there. You’ve helped a lot. I’m gonna write you again after getting my 1&1 account (I’ve just paid a six-month Beginner package), and after applying your instructions to get wordpress.
I also wish you soaring success at Hostgator. Hostgator was previously my final choice after so many days of checking web host reviews, but I had to go back to 1&1 because I figured I’m a newbie and I should spend as little as possible while I’m learning.
1and 1 is a nightmare……..I had a site up for 2 days when I could not get into it, I contacted their support and they said I upgraded it and changed the PW. I told them I did no such thing and that someone hacked the account. They said they would get back to me in24 hours. No contact in 48. After 8 calls to a variety of departments and 16 days they told me that my card was declined for all new site registrations all 26 of them. WOW they allowed a hacker to try to upgrade my account and register a tom of new domains. And that my account was terminated. Fine ok whatever! They then said if I wanted to start again I was welcome to, as all was clear. So I did. Well after 72 hours no registration confirmation email. I called and my account was locked out as assessment was still pending on old account under my name and email. They have refused to refund both registration fees at this point. The source of all my issues from the start has been that all the different departments at 1and1have no idea what the other is doing. I am switching for sure and taking all my accounts with me.
Personally I use Lunarpages for myself as well as for work. I have also recommended Lunarpages to friends and between the accounts I’ve set up and my friend we have 10-15 over the last few years. There have been some issues with customer support, but mostly their hosting just plain works. very little down time and most of it was scheduled server maintenance (so there was notice ahead of time and again the down times have been brief). The amount of storage space/emails/data bases is quite staggering, especially for the price. Also I love cPanel. In fact when I signed up the most recent account there was even an option for which version of Apache you wanted to be hosted on (as well as version of PHP I believe). I’ve heard of 1and1 but have not used them. I had not heard of HostGator prior to this article.