1and1 Hosting Has Gone Sour For Me

1and1 LogoI’ve been using 1and1 shared hosting for about five years. Until last month it was great; fast, cheap, reliable and when I did have a problem it was fixed quickly, usually in less than an hour.

January thorough August this year I averaged 2 hours/month  downtime as measured by host-tracker.com.  That works out to 99.7% uptime which I consider pretty good for shared hosting.  Then things started to go downhill.  September saw nine hours of downtime and in the first six days this month WapReview.com has been down 22 hours.

Yeswap.com has fared even worse.  On Sept 20th both sites, which were on the same shared hosting package, started returning HTTP 500 errors approximately every other request.

1and1’s explanation was that I was hitting their limit of 12 simultaneous processes.  This didn’t sound right because my traffic today is half what it was in March when Chinese users discovered the HTML to WML transcoder on Yeswap.com and started to hit it with 50,000 requests a day, presumably to get around the “Great Firewall”.  After a month of that, with the site handling the traffic with no signs of stress, Chinese traffic dropped overnight to about 50 requests per day.  I guessing that yeswap.com got blocked in China too.  Why am I hitting the limit now when I wasn’t with 2X the traffic, I don’t understand.  The only logical explanation is that the 12 process limit is new.

I tried to solve the problem by purchasing a second shared hosting package from 1and1 and moving yeswap.com to it. I figured that by isolating the WapReview blog traffic from yeswap.com, both sites would have more headroom and perform better.  At first, it seemed to work. I checked several times a day for a  couple of days and all seemed well.  Then I got sick and was unable to monitor the site for a while.  Last week I took a look at yeswap.com again and discovered that the dreaded error 500 was back and worse than ever.  The site varies from being completely down for hours on end to working approximately every other request.  1and1 has been “investigating” for 72 hours with no resolution or explanation.

I tend to believe that yeswap.com really is attempting to use more than 12 processes. 1and1’s PHP implementation spawns a new process for every request so the limit translates to 12 simultaneous requests.  Yeswap gets a lot of requests, about 40,000 daily pageviews, but the pages are small, under 3KB, and most are pulled from a cache with no database access needed.

At this point I’m looking for recommendations for a new hosting service. 1and1 has become unreliable and  the tech support structure seems to have collapsed under the load. Issues which used to be resolved in a hour or less now go unanswered for days.

My requirements are PHP 4 or 5 and MySQL support and a monthly cost of $20 or less. The sites to be hosted are this WordPress blog which averages about 5500 daily PV’s plus yeswap.com, a  high volume (40,000 daily PV’s), but low bandwidth (no images, page size under 3KB) mobile web site.

I’m leaning toward Dreamhost’s shared hosting based on the generally good reports I see about DH on the web and the fact that they claim not to limit the number processes and to have “flexible” limits on CPU utilization.  I’m also intrigued by Media Temple’s Grid Server which sounds good on paper; a cluster of servers connected to a SAN with traffic continually load balanced to send requests to the the least loaded server.  It sounds like a smart architecture but I’m a little leery as I’ve  seem a number of complaints on web forums about excessive latency and database issues with the service.

So I’m looking to the lazy web here.  If you have any experience, good or bad with Dreamhost or Media Temple I love to hear from you.  Or if there’s another other shared hosting provider you really like, please tell me about it.

12 thoughts on “1and1 Hosting Has Gone Sour For Me

  1. I think that you can use Hostinger.This is very cheap.And I am using the free plan of them giving me 20gb and php upto 7.0!But only two mysql databases.You can try this.

  2. LOL you should update this today.
    All 1and1 email is down, and calling support yields “All circuits are busy.” Yikes…

  3. It appears that a process gone bad was my problem as well. The 1and1 tech support people ran a “fix” that killed all processes on that server and in about an hour I was up and running.

    I know I caused the problem – I was editing a Joomla! component and was working on a controller that uploads files – I inadvertently created a folder instead of a file – and some orphan slashes probably gave the server fits – so bad that it 500’d out.

    Do you have a link to PHPShell? I’d like to see if I can run that since 1and1 doesn’t have any error logs (and they don’t provide them).

    Tom

  4. @Tom Fuller

    Sorry to here about you hosting woes.

    Believe it or not I’m still on 1and1. Yeswap.com started working after being intermittently down for a little over three days.

    After it came back up, I installed PHPShell and started monitoring the server. I discovered that one of my scripts was not terminating properly leaving orphan process running. I could find anything wrong with the script so wrote a little Perl script to kill any PHP process that were over two minutes old. I set the script to run every 15 minutes using the U-Cron WordPress plugin from http://www.activeblogging.com/info/wordpress-cron-plugin/ Since doing that I’ve had no downtime on yeswap.com.

    I was ready to leave 1and1 and contacted support at Dreamhost and HostGator. When I told them how much traffic I was getting they both indicated that I would likely have problems with that much traffic on their shared hosting plans.

    As I can’t really afford a dedicated server and 1and1 is fast and seems to handle my load as long as I don’t run out of processes I decided to stick with them.

  5. Today (Oct 24, 2008) I suddenly started getting 500 errors from my 1and1 hosted sites. Technical support said there was a problem with my .htaccess file but after renaming it to htaccess.txt – nothing changed.

    Like other posters, the site is reachable but not with every request. http://www.joomlaoregon.org.

    I have generally found 1and1 to be good to work with – much faster web response times than GoDaddy – and the price is right. But this post has me concerned!

  6. Just had the same problem with 1and1… 8 hours and still my website is not up. They say they had a problem and that they are working to solve it…. I mean I work in technology and know that these things happen however… for so many hours means they are not getting ready for the eventual problems. I would choose if I had the option right now another host. Web.com for example where I host some other sites has been a very good option, not so cheap but the theory has been proven you get what you pay for.

  7. 1and1 Internet is lousy, they will over bill you, over charge you and everything is outsourced to cheap callcenters. 1and1 Internet SUCKS, run for your life.

  8. If you have domains listed with 1and1, and you chose to let domains expire on their renewal dates, 1and1 punishes the customer by unlocking the domains. I guess this is to make it easier for people to steal them.
    Also it takes 8 separate steps, by trial and error, to even find the site to indicate your renewal choice.
    I don’t have any beef with 1and1’s web hosting. However, I curse the day I ever listed any domains with them. Investigative journalist, Kelli Jack states: “1and1 should be shut down.” The Pennsylvania Better Business Bureau has them listed as “Unsatisfactory” Check out Red Flag for some customer comments.

  9. I actually have accounts with 1and1 and dreamhost. 1and1 has been the better performer for me. I find dreamhost to be very slow and sluggish (I run Trac, SVN, and MySql).

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