1 and 1 Drupal Hosting Review

One of the first hosting companies I heard about was 1 and 1 Communications. It was recommended by a coworker, and the pricing was just right for me at the time. I was just getting started on designing better websites with CSS layouts in HTML, and decided to register my own domain. I was then told about the Drupal content management system from another coworker. He explained that all of that tedious coding I was doing for each page by hand, could be handled by the Drupal CMS and that I could style it the way I want. Once I got my domain from GoDaddy, I decided to look into getting a host with PHP and MySQL which Drupal required. It turned out that 1 and 1 had those features in it's beginner package, and that is what my first website hosting company was.

Over the first few months I was in la la land, because I had all the features I needed and it was really cheap. I think my first plan was like $1.99/month for 6 months or something crazy like that. It was all great and grand until I had made my 10th database. I had a few subdomains I was going to be working off of for testing and things like that, and it turns out that my package was limited to 10 MySQL databases. Obviously I could have just gone and gotten another beginner account, but I wanted more MySQL databases.

I ended up getting a 2nd account, but this time around I got a home account. It was around 3.99/month on promotion I think. I will say that this account had some better features overall, but once again was limited in it's databases to 25 this time. I was really trying to expand my testing grounds, but ended up finding a few more sites that I wanted to register. The next thing you know, I had 20 databases setup. I really didn't want to setup another account as I thought that with the money I was paying, I should be getting more for my money.

Customer service was one thing that I can say I very much disliked about the 1 and 1 hosting program, and was really lacking. Every time that I called, I got someone who spoke broken English, and really couldn't help my problem. I ended up handling most of my problems through their support email instead. In the end, I even had to cancel my account through an automated system, as they refused to do it over the phone.

There are many reasons I left in the end, but to start off, both of my accounts were limited on several levels, which I didn't really notice until I was really getting serious about hosting my sites. I then started running into problems with my Drupal installs where the sites wouldn't respond properly sometimes. At this point my 6 months at $1.99/month was up, and even my deal for the home account was up. I started to wonder if there was a better deal out there, that hosting Drupal on their services, I might not encounter these problems. I ended up looking around for a while, and found Hostgator. Needless to say, I ended up switching to Hostgator because their services have many more features.

I give the 1 and 1 hosting service a 3 out of 10 for Drupal Hosting. The service is good for beginners, but not for intermediate to advanced Drupal webmasters. Overall, customer service was horrible.