I originally moved all of my clients over to them and within a month began to have problems. Those problems were causing my clients to loose money. I ended up moving all but one (who wanted to stay) over to HostGator and have had a wonderful experience with them.

Still having problems (even today) with the one client.. DON’T USE KIOSKWS hosting, a big mistake!

1&1 assume continuation and then charge for renewal. This is fraud. Today I had a letter from their Finance company Arvato Finance asking for £11.88

This is a threatening letter which instantly gets my back up.

They are basically asking for payment for a service I didnt want. And to top it all their cancellation policy is clumsy and overcomplicated requiring you to enter details into multiple screens, press buttons hidden way down on pages, and then to top it off needs email link clicking. So what happens if the final email doesnt arrive for you to click the link? Yes you guessed it ! – The account stays live and they send debt collection agencies around to get cash.

If you like the website 1&1 then just be warned that they have a nasty way of manking you pay for many more years once you are hooked in.

No company I have ever dealt with auto-charges you. Think about your car insurance. Can you imagine them sending debt collection if you renew with someone else? This is just nasty money making.

Now I have to try and get my money back. Not impressed AT ALL.
Richard Hazell
365Drills

You may be able to find somewhere with a server for under $50pm but the specs wouldn’t be anything to shout home about.

If you want to let me know what server specs you are looking for, or the sort of traffic/resources you estimate using I’d be able to give you some more advice.

Very difficult to cancel. Will send your name to collections even if by their fault you did not complete the long and complicated cancellation process (that is not confirmed cancellation by the email they never sent).

Never do anything with 1and1.com. This is the worst experience with a registrar ever.

Whilst some of your criticisms are fair I feel that I should speak up for Kiosk having been a customer for a couple of years now.

In complete contrast to Alan I have to say that I have always been more than happy with both uptime and support and wouldn’t risk moving to a lower priced shared hosting plan with anyone.

The recent data center move is the only time I have suffered downtime and that was only for very short periods (less than 30 minutes). I once had an issue with an autoresponder account and that took a few days to pin down, but aside from that they have been first rate for reliability. There are plenty of support options and the staff know their stuff.

The affiliate program may seem complex at first site but it works well and if you actively promote the company like I do you can easily cover and surpass your hosting costs every month (so my hosting has effectively been free for a long time)

I do agree with you on the site design and have raised this with Joel myself. They really do need to improve things area. Maybe a book should not be judged by it’s cover, but that’s human nature and I think it’s probably their biggest flaw. A shame because it could easily be improved. The limited number of MySQL databases on my plan is my biggest gripe.

I suppose if you have had a bad experience the cost issue would really p*** you off, but I genuinely feel that I get value for money and that’s more important than cheap. I have free hosting accounts that suffer less downtime than some paid services!

Overall, I would recommend them and am happy to trust them with my sites.

I switched most of my sites over to Kiosk back end of 2007 and from Day 1, I have had nothing but problems, especially with downtime and/or exceedingly slow access.

Back in February/March I was logging support tickets on a daily basis for about a month due to server overloading causing my sites to slow to a snails pace.

I would agree with you that Kiosk Support is (or was) extremely good. Indeed, I have put in so many support tickets, I am on first name terms with the guys in support.

However, they have just migrated from Canada to a new server center in Texas and everything has gone downhill fast since last week. I am back to loosing access to my sites on a daily basis and if it is not complete downtime, it is taking anything up to a minute to open any given page in WordPress. I have watched the server stats and if the server load goes above about 20, bang goes site access.

Only today, the server fell over again so I logged yet another ticket. Server eventually came back up apart from one wordpress site. It has taken me all afternoon of badgering support as to what the problem was only to find the problem myself. Some clever so and so in their India support center decided to rewite my WordPress wp-config file using ones instead of the letter L resulting in the wrong MySQL database user name and 500 server errors.

I am so pee’ed off now that I am looking for a new host – I have had it with Kiosk now. In addition, I am in the UK and with the change in exchange rate, it is way too expensive for a service they are not capable of providing.

So, being as you are UK as well, have you any good hosting recommendations. I have been looking at UK based hosts because of the dollar/pound exchange rate but cannot find a lot of reviews.

Alan K