1&1 Hosted Exchange Service suffers outage

Whoops picked this up on a Google News Alert. It seems 1&1's hosted exchange service provided by 1and1.com has been totally "unreachable" all day (26th April).

Apparently some users were reporting their Outlook Web Access (OWA), email push clients even Outlook got absolutely nowhere trying to establish a connection.

According to 1&1 tech support they were down for 14-16 hours as of about 10:30PM PST (UTC -8) though the status page at http://status.1and1.com had not apparently been updated.

1&1 Linux Web Hosting

For a limited time, 1&1 are offering three months free hosting on their Linux Web Hosting platform. Then s just £4.99 per month. Each hosting plan comes with free Web Building and Marketing Tools which is pretty comprehensive.

Recently 1&1 announced major changes to it's web hosting plans. ASP and PHP scripting was added to all its plans and free .co.uk, .me.uk and .org.uk are included for the life of the plan. Don't know what happens to those domains if you cancel, but I suspect you can transfer them to another tag as they will be registered in your name.

The PHP enhancements recently introduced on even the most "basic" plans are welcome as they allow a wider range of blogger and forum type applications to be installed in your webspace. Admittedly 1&1 provide free CGI's but these seem a little tacky. You are of course free to download any free CGI/Perl scripts you find on the internet and upload them to your 1&1 webspace!

Weycrest Hostgator Speed Test

Quick and dirty test comparing the speed of UK Weycrest Shared Web Host and US based Hostgator.

The faster the server and page load, the less time visitor has to wait for a page to load in their web browser.

There are additional factors which can vary response times, for example database query (if you have a dynamic site) php script execution time and process, peak time etc.

Ping results show my Weycrest server is fast with ping times from my Entanet broadband connections less than 28ms

Pinging www.weycrest-coupon.com [85.13.195.119] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 85.13.195.119: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=55
Reply from 85.13.195.119: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=55
Reply from 85.13.195.119: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=55
Reply from 85.13.195.119: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=55

This also illustrates how important it can be to host in the UK if your target audience is mainly based in the UK. Let ping a US based web hosts

Pinging hostgator.com [67.18.54.2] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 67.18.54.2: bytes=32 time=137ms TTL=47
Reply from 67.18.54.2: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=47
Reply from 67.18.54.2: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=47
Reply from 67.18.54.2: bytes=32 time=138ms TTL=47

So there you have it. Your Weycrest UK website would be almost 5X faster than if it were were hosted in the US.

Lets try another host. How about 1&1?

Pinging 1and1.com [217.160.232.1] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 217.160.232.1: bytes=32 time=136ms TTL=46
Reply from 217.160.232.1: bytes=32 time=135ms TTL=46
Reply from 217.160.232.1: bytes=32 time=135ms TTL=46
Reply from 217.160.232.1: bytes=32 time=137ms TTL=46

So Weycrest (in my quick test) come out better against 1&1. But wait a minute where exactly is 1and1.co.uk hosted?

Tracing route to 1and1.co.uk [212.227.126.68]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1>

5 27 ms 27 ms 28 ms te4-3.telehouse-east.core.enta.net [87.127.236.8
1]
6 28 ms 28 ms 26 ms linx.gw-backbone-a.lon.schlund.net [195.66.224.9
8]
7 42 ms 43 ms 42 ms te-1-3.bb-c.bap.rhr.de.oneandone.net [212.227.12
0.49]
8 44 ms 45 ms 45 ms te-1-1.gw-dists-a.bs.ka.oneandone.net [212.227.1
16.208]
9 45 ms 47 ms 46 ms 1and1.co.uk [212.227.126.68]

Seems to route out to Germany. Thats another thing to watch. You might think you are getting UK based hosting, but in fact you end up your site hosted in Germany.

Also you stand a better chance of ranking well on Google.co.uk with a UK based IP address. This might give your site the edge if your competitors chose a slower overseas based hosts.