David Cameron's Diary

I have been troubled for some time with my current Hosting Provider - 1and1.co.uk.

I have noticed occasional blips in the receipt of email over the last couple of months and support were not helpful, denying any problem at 1and1s end; however, this last week has been the worst ever with complaints on many forums and 1and1 apparently unable to resolve the problems over the course of several days and falsely claiming that problems were fixed.

I actually upgraded my package with 1and1 before realising how big the problems seemed to have been - I still don't know what the cause is, but I regret the upgrade and the additional cash that I will have put 1and1s way.

Because of the problems and the delay in putting them right, I determined to find another provider. I had a look around and in general people seem to be disillusioned with their hosting providers, but I found what I think may be a little gem in Red Fox Hosting for the following reasons:

Positive reasons for settling on Red Fox Hosting:

1. Red Fox use the superb Helm Control Panel to manage all aspects of your domains & mail settings.
2. A number of tools are available to be installed and with modest tweaking, to run 'out of the box', e.g. forums.
3. Other hosting providers advertise unlimited domain hosting in your package, but then you realise that you can only have one set of FrontPage Server Extensions crossing all your domains. With Red Fox Hosting each domain you set up is truly independent of each other with the ability to apply FPSE, ASP, ASP.NET1.0 or ASP.NET2.0 on a per domain basis.
4. All mail is subject to user configurable spam & phishing filtering without additional monthly charges
5. All Red Fox servers are hosted in the UK and therefore no google disadvantaging with a .co.uk domain physically hosted in e.g. Germany (1and1 is part of Schlund AG - a German Company) - you can be knocked out of the "only include UK pages" if the hosting server is not physically in the UK, something I only learned through this search for a new provider. That's a problem if you are targetting the UK and people only ask Google (or other search engines) to serve up only UK pages.
6. The configuration defaults to creating control panels and webmail under your very own domain e,g, http://cp.[yourdomain] and http://mail.[yourdomain] - it feels more personalised and memorable.
7. No constraints on database sizes - all space comes out of your allotted diskspace on the package.
8. Very real participation and responsiveness of the Director on their own forums
9. Realistic pricing and if I decide to commit, then there is an annual plan that gives 2 months free versus a monthly contract.
10. Some great reseller options for either revenue raising, or maybe you just want some more room to manouevre supporting larger personal sites.

The only negative (or is it?) that I see:

Because I have had the flexibility of using catch-all emails in the past, I felt able to use them freely e.g. amazon@mydomain, bt@mydomain all forwarded to myreal@ddress . That was great to assist filtering of email and to identify misuse of mailing lists by those third-parties. However, Red Fox Hosting don't provide that by default. You can raise a support ticket to request it, and if they consider your reasons good enough, they are prepared to allow it at their discretion (I don't know how accommodating they will be in that).

But maybe that isn't a negative after all - I bet that everyone with catch-all email addresses have big spam problems with fabricated email addresses on the domain hitting their inbox just like me - maybe I should be neutral on this one rather than negative and think whether I could gain from the change.

Early Verdict

I have taken out a monthly contract (for my own trial purposes) on a Shared Hosting package. This provides for 2GB of web/mailspace and 15GB traffic, cancellable at any time.

I have only been with them for a couple of days now and I am delighted with what I see and have moved over a few sites (e.g. http://www.lettersfromsanta.co.uk) without hiccups (registration of the sites is still held by 1and1, but I was able to easily repoint via DNS on 1and1's basic control panel).

Although I think that they are a serous contender for my business, I am not quite ready to commit for the long term until I have given them a bit more of a trial run. As at date of this posting, this very domain is hosted by Red Fox Hosting, but I am open to persuasion on the best provider to go for based upon others experiences or reasearch. I am sure that there must be other disgruntled 1and1 customers out there that have been looking around this week just like me.

Still to research

I am not sure about the domain registration aspect - I don't know where to place that when I ultimately do cancel my 1and1 contract - for they will let my domain registrations lapse when I cancel. I don't know whether there is an easy option to separate the hosting and registration to get an overall more competitive price?

If anyone has any experience of transferring their domains to a new registrar, I would be glad to hear advice on that. Sure, I could transfer the domains over to the final hosting provider, but could I get a better price elsewhere with a reliable renewal process? Please post your thoughts.

Provisional Red Fox Scoring 9.5/10

I knocked off 0.5 simply because I would have liked to have had the opportunity to have a catch-all email address at my discretion rather then Red Fox's, but otherwise their services and accessibility to them has exceeded my expectations and represents remarkable value. Definitely worth a look-see for all those soon to be ex-customers of 1and1.

Labels: 1and1, mail problems, Red Fox Hosting, UK Hosting Providers

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