My 3 year free hosting at 1&1 expired a few days ago and originally I wasn’t planning on extending the service. I already have my own paid domain and web hosting service at Dreamhost and didn’t think it was necessary to have 2. Plus if I recall correctly, 1&1 was charging $10/mo for a pretty cheap service (1gb of space and 5gb of bandwidth/month). However, the 1&1 thread in B$ became active again as people began to ask what to do now that their 1&1 account was expiring.
For those who wanted a cheap service, I suggested E-RICE which is $10/yr and I heard the service is good and reliable. For those who can’t afford to have any downtime, I suggested to just stay with 1&1 because the price was actually $3.99/mo and that’s not too bad. For $48/yr and reliable service, it’s a decent deal.
I’ve been meaning to port over my old site’s blog entries into WordPress, but never really got the time. If you look at my archives, you can tell that I’ve started as there’s a few months of 2002 in there. Initially I was hoping to port all my entries before my account expires, but then I got lazy. I do have everything backed up (all my files, my databases, etc). Now that I find out it’s not $10/mo, but just $3.99/mo, I thought why not just extend my contract.
Someone on the thread mention about the $2.99/month Hosting Beginner plan. I had seen this plan initially, but thought it wasn’t that great. The space and bandwidth were more than my current plan, but I must’ve misread it because I thought this plan had no databases (i.e. MySQL) and even my old blog ran on a database. But apparently it comes with 10 databases and has 10GB of space and 300GB of bandwith/month (vs 1GB and 5GB respectively), and for $1 cheaper, it seemed like the obvious choice.
I began searching around their FAQ to find out how to downgrade, if possible. I found this:
DOWNGRADES
You can downgrade a package by contacting support at support@1and1.com
or call support at 1 877 435 7281
I shot them a email and they approved my downgrade. Apparently, it’s the same process as canceling where you goto https://cancel.1and1.com and began a cancellation process. After you select the plan you want to cancel, it gives you a choice of cancellation or switch to another plan. I tried to switch to another plan but was given an error that I’m not allowed to switch plans within 30 days of switching (which I’m guessing they’re counting my FREE to $3.99/mo switch). I shot another email to support asking what to do and within a couple hours, I was able to switch. It actually gave me a whole bunch of choices, but I had already decided which plan I wanted a long time ago. Do note, they have to approve your downgrade/upgrade before you can do this process. I know because I canceled another account earlier and the choice of downgrading/upgrading wasn’t available.
Another cool thing about the $2.99/month plan is that it comes with a free domain. I have finally completed my TRIO:
krunk4ever.com
krunk4ever.net
krunk4ever.org
http://www.krunk4ever.net currently just points to my old blog. I no longer have to remember this awful URL: http://s86952823.onlinehome.us. I’ve also decided it was a good time to add some ads to it. I don’t really know how much traffic my old site gets, but why not make some money off of it while I’m in there mucking around.
One thing I did noticed was I no longer had shell access. My 1&1 was my first web hosting company that provided shell access which was really neat and really useful if you know what you’re doing. However, with the downgraded plan, I noticed shell access is now disabled. Not really a big deal for me since I don’t plan to do much more development on this site, but if my main site was located on this server, I would definitely need shell access.