Patrick asked me to share my two cents about 1&1 and so I'll write a bit about whats bothering me about them.
-- RANT MODE ON -- (move down to MY ADVICE, if you don't want to hear me whining.):
I have an extremely bad history with this company and I'm moving EVERY CLIENT hosting at this company to another hoster. I've even turned down jobs where this was not possible.
What they do really good, is advertising. Don't know how it is in the UK, but here they are all over the place and I have to admit, they are doing a decent job telling people how great they are in about everything.
Whenever I listen to a brainwashed client about "awesome service" and that they "never had a problem" with them, I dearly paid for it.
The main reason is that they are too expensive and I'm not talking about hosting costs...
I'm talking about:
* the time spend fixing things that work out of the box on Hosting "A" but don't on Hosting "B"
* volatile server performance,
* questionable administration,
That being said, leaving them also has its problems.
No imapsync, terminal, etc. for shared hosting makes it much harder to transfer data (server, e-mails, etc) to a new hoster.
But even terminating business with them turned out to be a nightmare more than once.
Ok, thats enough ranting.
-- RANTMODE OFF --
-- MY ADVICE --
* Collect some solid data about your hosting environment. Post here what you can share with us.
* Start with phpinfo, compare the values against the modx recommendations.
* Check the php version your webspace is running. Most likely it is 5.2. You can change the php version on the dashboard. I'd recomment 5.4, but 5.5 might be worth a try.
* Next check you mysql version. Sad but true, it is most likely 5.1 and there is nothing you can do about it from the dashboard. Might be worth a asking them to move your db to another server running a newer version.
* Also check your phpmyadmin version. I've met some quite old versions running on 1&1. Be careful, some of them have "issues" exporting databases.
* Note down the version numbers for a couple of important libraries (especially graphic libraries like imagick, gdlib). Some projects simply don't work well with outdated versions.
* Google for a mysql/php benchmark script and let them run a couple of times. Compare the results to another server
**
http://www.free-webhosts.com/php-benchmark-script.php
**
http://www.webdesign-informatik.de/php/php-mysql-benchmark-scripts/
These benchmarks are not necessarily useful for measuring the performance of a MODX project, but at least they give you an idea whats going on on a server at different times of the day.
* Finally not all hostings at 1&1 are running on the same server. Some of them are running quite old hardware and software. I remember switching servers on Strato speeding up performance tenfold. Ask them about it.
That's all that comes to my mind for the moment.
Cheers,
pepebe
