Three free years hosting @ www.1and1.com ...for real?

They are offering three free years of web-hosting.

Is this for real? I searched, didn't look like there were any catches.

URL


Website/Connectivity:
Hosted on I/O optimized own 1&1 Linux version
500 MB web space
5,000 MB/month traffic ($.99 per GB for additional traffic)
No limits on simultaneous hits/bandwidth
Protected by firewall
Continuous backups of your website
99.9% Uptime guarantee



Website features:
Advanced live site statistics, log files, ready-to-run CGI-library, own CGI programming (Perl, Python), FrontPage 2002 extensions
Advanced Password Protection
5 FTP accounts
PHP3 & PHP4
MySQL
Proxy SSL Secure Server
Cron Jobs
SSH Secure Shell Access
Advanced Developer Tools
CRM/E-commerce:
WebElements
Newsletter Tool
One-on-one online dialogue
Turn-key web database applications
Chats
Forums

It is real but read through some of the forums on how their support has been. If you have a non critical site then hey give them a try but if your site is a business then you get what you pay for.

They were always good to me when I had hosting with them as their UK branch. What pisses us Europeans off is their very costly $25mil venture into the US market is being funded off our payments.
OneandOne will start to dominate the US market if they do better pricing. I always considered them quite expensive. But for the time I was with them I had 0 downtime (10 months) and no probs with customer services - though yes it can take a few hours to get a reply.
But if you are reasonably seasoned in websites you prolly dont need to contact customer support anyway.

From what I have read their is a difference in support for those that are paying vs those that are not...I'm glad your paid service was good.

I tried thier service. And here are my reports.

First I think most of the 25mil was spent on the building. If not then they got ripped off.

Second they have room for 25,000 servers, but they do not have a connection that can handle more than 1000. 12,000 mbits is only 12gb or about an oc48 and a half.
I work in a building that has 2 oc48 connections for 700 computers. Just computers not servers. Which is a 18.5gb internet connection or 18,500 Mbits.

When I tested the response, it came back inbetween 15-20 secs. Very very slow. Most servers responed in less than 5 secs, and with 5 secs being the slowest. A good response would be .02 secs.

Backend software is at a very minium. Lacks the strong and powerful perl language.

I really don't think they plan on making money from hosting sites. Rather from rent of the other offices in their building.

Yes if they charged more than $5. usd per year(.50 per month) for there hosting service, I would consider it to be very expensive for what is being offered.

If that is there best plan, I would hate to see there worst.

Yes you europeons should be pissed off. Cause they've been ripping you off. I'am sorry but, I can not imagin paying for that. If I did, I would be pissed off too.

I currently have one of the "free" US accounts... (I say "free" because it is the professional account, that you don't pay for for three years).

I can't complain a whole lot. Their support is slow... So I use this mostly instead: http://s88567960.onlinehome.us/forums/index.php?

Their control panel takes about 15 to 20 seconds to load each page. My websites (I have 11) load near instantly. So I have no problems with the hosting, just the support....

And with a little bit of digging, and a few posts here, you can get buy w/out most of it.