Our web hosting provider

Over the years, your webmaster has had experience of several different web hosting companies - some good, some bad, and some, very bad! During the last three years this and several other domains for which I do websites have been relocated to the company 1 & 1. This is the biggest provider of web hosting services to the UK and I have been satisfied with it. I'm usually reluctant to do product endorsement but in this case I can happily recommend 1 & 1 and, if you decide to use them, it will also help if you take out their service via the link below, which carries our identifier so that they can make a deduction from our own hosting costs. We have the basic business package.

What's good, what's not so good

• Competitive prices - not the cheapest overall, but good value for the facilities offered
• Reliability and speed: during the last few years, 100% uptime in my experience; fast server response times
• Facilities: pragmatic approach to facilities a webmaster wants. Full domain / subdomain control; excellent administrative and security options; statistics; email and database control. Good range of additional facilities to make things easier for those who are unsure of programming things by themselves
• Very good, up-to-date range of scripting and programming languages, and adequate (MYSQL) database provision. All with very few restrictions in the basic business paclage
• Excellent online 'help' material in the FAQs
• Absolutely no hassle over domain registration, DNS control, transfer in or out
• Personal technical support is not so good but the FAQs mean you rarely need it, and in any case 1 & 1 have worked to improve it lately
• Their domain registrar (Schlumberger) and the 1 & 1 hosting servers are located in Germany. This used to carry a penalty in that searches in Google restricted to 'sites in the UK' would exclude them because their internet location was physically in Germany. This seems to have changed around the end of 2006 following lobbying of Google (including from this site) and the problem has fallen away

During the last eight years I have at various times used Supanames, Tiscali, Claranet, Pickaweb, Fasthosts, BT, GoDaddy and several other lesser hosts, and 1 & 1 is the only one I can fully recommend.

If you want to take out a domain name or hosting package with 1 & 1 please use this link and it will help to reduce the costs of this Residents' Association web site. Thanks.