I feel that it is my responsibility to write a post about my hosting experiences with these two companies. I started using 1AND1 a while back when they were offering those free “professional” hosting accounts for 3 years. Not a bad deal, I had nothing to lose. For two years all was well on 1AND1, I hosted this same blog on there, I hosted a couple of low traffic websites. So after graduating from University I started up my own design business and began putting some of my customers onto 1AND1. For the price and features it is a solid solution. However what you can’t see is downtime. No amount of refunds can really cover the tireless frustrating hours of down time on a mission critical website.

The worst down times I experienced on 1AND1 were five, 4-5 hour outages in the course of one week. Yeah, talk about unacceptable. The weird thing is I was lucky enough to have 2 customers on the problematic server while 4 other accounts ran flawlessly and have still run flawlessly. After a week of useless talking to 1AND1 support agents, I finally decided it was time to start looking for a new web host. I looked around at DreamHost, MediaTemple, and Mosso. Currently on my account I host 10 websites across 5 domains. I was however looking for something not only I could move to but also bring my old customers as well as new ones with me as well.

Mosso looked quite promising, however the $99.00 price tag wasn’t so attractive. And the idea of having to bill my own customers wasn’t an attractive one. DreamHost looked very attractive, but when I started searching google about the, I noticed too many mixed reviews. This led me to Media Temple. They’re the only host that I had seen its customers boasting with little MT logos about their hosting company. So I looked into it, read reviews and have given it a whirl. So far, as a designer/developer, I couldn’t be more happy with the hosting experience.

In 3 months my site hasn’t gone down yet, speed has remained consistent, and customer service is excellent. There is a slight higher price tag for Media Temple, but it’s a price tag with paying. You can read Media Temple’s features on their website. I haven’t been happier with a web host yet. All of my domains have been moved onto my Grid Hosting account. Might I add that 1AND1 imposes a ridiculously low Database limit of 100 MgB per database. This just doesn’t cut it for CMS based websites.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 3:47 am and is filed under Deep Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.