1&1 Home review

If we were to rank web hosting purely on price per gigabyte of storage, 1&1’s Home package would be good value. Plus, you get a domain name with the package and unlimited bandwidth, which means that if your website suddenly takes off, you won’t get stuck with extra charges. For your money you also get support for one MySQL and one Microsoft SQL database and for PHP and Perl scripting languages. This gives more experienced web designers the ability to create more complex database-driven sites, or simply to do something like host an online shop.

Another handy feature is the inclusion of fifty subdomains. Small businesses in particular will need these if they want to use services like Microsoft Exchange or Remote Web Access or even some online shops; not options you want to close off by choosing the wrong package.

Of course, features aren’t everything – quality of service counts too. 1&1 is one of the few hosting companies to operate a dedicated 24/7 helpline. In our tests it was always answered within just a few minutes, even in the dead of night, and staff knew what they were talking about.

The online control panel is clean and well designed, making it easy to find what you’re looking for. Setting up FTP access and getting our test site online took only minutes. As well as a basic hosting service, the Home package offers some nice extras such as an RSS-feed creator and a form-builder for creating your own surveys from scratch. We particularly liked the SMS app, which allows you to send text messages your friends’ phones from the web. Sadly, it can’t be integrated into your site and there’s no client app.

The new Online Office apps (Writer, Sheet and Show) are a nice bonus – they’re powered by Zoho. There’s also online webmail and 2GB of online storage per user. Marketing tools are more or less limited to Google Sitemap and a newsletter tool, unless you want to pay for banner advertising.

1&1’s Home hosting package is well put together and easy to use, striking a nice balance between offering lots of features and making the service accessible to everyone. It isn’t the cheapest here, but if you want a UK-based provider with telephone support, it’s a fine choice.