1&1 dedicated servers

[Bill McGonigle]

On Oct 20, 2005, at 15:52, Drew Van Zandt wrote:

> Anyone have any personal experiences (good or bad) with 1&1 Internet
> Inc. ?   I'm shopping and they look decent...

I've been running bfccompputing.com there for almost 2 years now (since 
they opened in the US).  They're a very big Linux shop in Europe - such 
that my netblock in White Plains, NY was blackholed by Verizon when 
they decided to shut off mail exchange with Europe. :)

I'm paying $50 a month for a server with probably too little RAM for 
what I've got on it now, but the service has never failed in that time. 
  The best feature they have is their recovery stuff - you get a serial 
console you can ssh to and on their control panel you can set your 
server to reboot from a Debian live CD in the CD-ROM drive (I'm not 
even sure how they accomplish this on PC hardware).  I've painted 
myself out of some corners with those tools.

I've had one problem - the IDE drive they put in my machine had some 
bad blocks out of the starting gate.  I used the support e-mail instead 
of calling on the phone (probably unwise) and by time I got to someone 
who understood bad blocks by that method I had already booted to the 
abovementioned debian CD and fsck'ed with a bad-blocks map-out.  I 
think I lost 1 mail file but it could have been a passwd file or in the 
middle of my PostgreSQL database.  Having them replace a drive is a bit 
of a problem as they're not going to block-clone it for me so I'd have 
to backup and restore, probably from my cable modem's glorious 512K up. 
  I know this happens with some new drives but it would be nice if they 
would run badblocks on drives before they put them in.  In fact I 
filled out a survey today from them and requested an option for a 
second hard drive on their low-end server as I see this as the weak 
link in their service.  That and how I'm going to upgrade my RH9 server 
to FC4 without being there (building one locally seems to be the only 
option) but that seems to be the same with any remote hosting provider.

On the upside they have generators, security, appropriate A/C, very fat 
pipes to the Internet (with 100Mbps connectivity to the machine - my 
local CoLo still charges by the pipe size, not by the bit) and 
redundant paths out, so Tier-1 chickenfights don't cause problems.  I 
couldn't afford any of the last sentence if I were to do it myself, so 
economies of scale come into play.  Plus there's no capital outlay for 
a machine.

Ideally I'd have two machines there to ameliorate some of the above 
mentioned potential issues but that's on my "when I'm more profitable" 
list.

Oh, and they have an affiliate program, so if you click on 
http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=6717456 before signing up they might shave a 
few nickels off my bill.  If you're reselling that's probably more 
important than it is for me.

-Bill
-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Mobile: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Pager: 603.442.1833
Jabber: flowerpt at gmail.com      Text: bill+text at bfccomputing.com
Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/