File this under conversations from Twitter, since I’m writing this post after a convo started there about hosting, and several people asked why I don’t recommend 1&1 for hosting. Let me be clear: I emphatically do not recommend them for hosting and I can’t emphatically not recommend them enough. I do continue to register my domain names through them and will continue to do so. They’re cheap, they provide the privacy of your personal information for free, when most domain places charge extra for that, and I have no problems with them continuing to renew my domain name.
But when it comes to hosting, 1&1 should be at the bottom of your list. I came to learn this in an almost painful way after 3 years of hosting with them this past January.
Some of you who’ve read my blog might recall a few months ago, around the beginning of January, I was starting to have a lot of problems with my WordPress install. I made several posts wondering if anyone had any ideas about what might be causing the errors that were being thrown. I was unable to use a number of plugins, any type of auto-upgrading was out of the question and things were just becoming increasingly…wonky (yes, that’s a technical term). I posted help questions on WP but didn’t get any reply that helped my situation.
A few weeks after my issues started, I was in my 1&1 control panel doing…something. And I happened to notice that the database for this blog was nearing capacity. Not understanding these things at the time, I didn’t realize that 1&1′s 100mb database capacity is not only alarmingly low, it’s appallingly low. I emailed 1&1 customer support to find out what would happen once I reached my 100mb capacity and received an email in return that was not reassuring.
Thank you for contacting us.
If your WordPress blog reaches 100mb the tendency is your blog site will be lock or typically will be down and you can no longer access it.
So the best thing is to put it as much as possible below 100mb.If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
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Sincerely,
Jenealle Plaza
Technical Support
1&1 Internet
I panicked. Wouldn’t anyone? So I wrote back. I’d been a customer for 3 years, don’t use excessive bandwidth, and pay my bills on time. Surely they’d work with me and do…something?
That means I can never add content to my blog again unless I delete old content. Is there any way to get a database with more than 100mb of storage space? I’m not using my package for anything except blogging, so my usage stats aren’t extreme, and I’ve been with 1&1 long enough that I’d hate to have to move hosts because you can’t accommodate a blog on a database.
The answer, as it turns out, is no they wouldn’t.
Thank you for contacting us.
If you will delete some files on the data base and replace with new on, will it is possible.
But to exceed it more than 100mb then it will no longer be use.
The data base is not expandable nor can be added a memory since it is the only given capacity.If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
–
Sincerely,
Jenealle Plaza
Technical Support
1&1 Internet
Did I mention I panicked? I was getting dangerously close to that 100mb limit. Like…I only had maybe 1.2 mb or something ridiculous left. I didn’t know what I could delete and really, how could I continue to blog for any period of time and not keep adding content? Obviously, I couldn’t.
So the first thing I did was research some ways to try and bring my database size down to give myself some time and did a few of those things. Second thing I did was put out a call: who do you use for hosting? I got several great responses and though I eventually went with jaguarpc because it suited my needs better and had some options that were attractive to me, for a more reasonable price, I highly recommend Esosoft as well for their exceptional customer service and would not have regretted going with them either. One thing that’s important to note that I discovered is that you have to research what the database size is for each hosting site. 100mb is obscenly low when compared to the several gigabyte or even unlimited databases many hosts offer. When you’re researching a host, please be sure this is one of the questions you get an answer to: what is the database size maximum?
Here’s where I say: Thank God for the Bree half of the Moira Rogers writing duo. She’s a bit of a tech whiz and when I ran to her for help, she attempted to walk me through getting my site transferred to the new host. But unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. See, with the database almost maxed out, the host wouldn’t download my site. In fact, when I looked back at the past several months’ of my backups, I discovered the same thing. The host had been downloading an empty file and I hadn’t realized it. It never occurred to me that could happen. My backups weren’t backups at all. (which is even scarier in retrospect, when you think that my site could have been “locked” by a maxed database, and I wouldn’t have had even a backup available to recreate it with elsewhere).
Bree was able to extract my site by tearing it out in pieces and then reconstructing it. We did discover that my stats plugin was using a good bit of that database but in the end, that shouldn’t have mattered because the host shouldn’t have such an artificially low database size. It’s my fault for not realizing sooner but that’s why I’m telling my story here. Because if you host with 1&1, or another host that has a low database size, and you continue to add content to your blog or website, the potential for this happening to you is very real.
The end result of all this is that once I got my WordPress moved to a new hosting site, all (and I mean every single one) of the problems I had with my WP install and plugins disappeared. My issues weren’t WP related at all, the database was causing all of them.
I would also like to warn people about hosting with yahoo (I had their small business package, not a freebie site). I was hacked last year and yahell customer service did nothing to help me restore my site. When I decided to move my domain as a result, I learned that they had disabled all of the WordPress export functionality in their control panel. I lost years and years of posts, which made me really sad (I’ve been blogging in some form since 2003). Luckily I had begun cross-posting to lj, and that saved the last year or so of my posts. In many ways, I felt like I was held hostage, until I finally decided that leaving was more important than keeping my old blog entries.
Always good to have this kind of information, sorry you had such a rotten experience. I used to do Web design and development back in the 90′s and had my fair share of hosting trials and tribulations and having people post their experiences was always useful and very helpful. That said, I now maintain several blogs through a hosting company that I’ve been with for about a decade and they have *never* done me wrong. Their prices are phenomenal given everything they provide, including great customer service. Recently they dropped their prices in light of the recession, another big bonus in my opinion. If you are ever looking for a great hosting company that’s reliable, personable and works with you, try http://www.gh1.com (and no, I don’t get any referral bonuses, they’re just that good).
Thank you for the warning and the recommendations.
And at some point, I think I would have asked them for a decoder ring.
Good to know! I have a friend who hosts with them, but no blog, just a website. If she decides to add a blog, I’ll point her in a different direction.
There are a few things you can do with a MySQL to help compress it, but if you have tech person in your pocket she probably set up the tasks for you. Optimizing and analyzing your tables come first to mind.
The other thing to check about backups…not to worry you but important. If you don’t have logging on (and a lot of places don’t) you won’t be able to restore to a point in time. So say, your backup happens at 10PM every night. You do some blogging and then your system crashes at eh, Noon, without logging you’ve now lost everything from 10PM to noon…
Holy crap. I work in IT…I wonder where their support center is located. I could make a few guesses based on the wording of those emails you received–’splains a lot. :nocomment:
Thanks for the warnings and recommendations about hosts. It’ll be good information to have in the future.
Crazy, frustrating anecdotes like yours make me doubly glad I stayed with the relatively low-stress Blogger. Not to say I haven’t heard a few stories with Blogger too, but all-in-all, I can live without the added stress that hosted WordPress sites seem to frequently have.
In my opinion, anyone who wants to have a successful internet business should avoid 1and1 internet like the Black Plaque. There is a reason why the Pennsylvania Better Business Bureau have them listed as: “F.” The BBB’s lowest rating.