Marc Charbonneau

I’m just about done moving Downtown Software House and my other domains to my new host, 1&1. Switching hosts is always a pain; besides worrying about setting up new mailboxes and configuring my domains, I’ve had to import mySQL backups, rewrite some PHP code (1&1 doesn’t include all the PEAR modules I was using before) and generally poke around and hope I catch anything that might end up broken.

I won’t name names, but my last provider was simply terrible. Besides charging higher than average prices, they were horribly unreliable, had trouble with Macintosh .dmg disk images, and were prone to making configuration changes that broke my websites and email without any real warning. In short, it was completely unacceptable, and I should have stopped giving them money months ago.

After doing some research, the best choice I found was 1&1. Good prices, a long list of features, and they have a great reputation for reliability, which is always a complaint among the big names in shared hosting providers. Their website seems tailored to businesses rather than techies, but I’ve actually been very pleased with the in-depth management tools and configuration options they offer. For instance, managing multiple domains is a breeze to do, especially compared to my old provider where it took a trouble ticket and days to get anything done.

This is starting to sound like a paid commercial, but I’ve been very happy with their service so far, and felt a need to comment. Along with the move I’ve decided it’s finally time to some site re-design, so you’ll be seeing a few blog entries about that over the next few days.