grack.com

Looks like 1&1 hosting is having some trouble with my site.  I’m in the process of temporarily shifting the site elsewhere so things might be a bit broken for a bit while the DNS changes propagate.

UPDATE (6/26/2004): Since Google has been directing a few people to this site, I thought I’d at least describe the situation a bit more.  It looks like one of the 1&1 servers with my host on it crashed, leaving my site inaccessible for more than a week.  When they finally brought it back up (from backups, I assume) it had incorrect permissions and I couldn’t update anything.  After a number of support requests (email and form-based), I finally managed to convince them that it was their problem.  The first engineer even gave me a templated response, without reading my support mail!

It took a total of two weeks for the whole thing to be resolved, but it’s been pretty good so far since then.  I know of another person hosted by 1&1 that hasn’t had any issues, so I might just have been unlucky.  Since I’m using their three-years-free-no-strings-attached plan, I’m not going to complain too much.

My biggest peeve with 1&1 is that DNS has to be hosted by 1&1.  You’ll get a nasty mail if your domain’s nameservers aren’t 1&1’s and they check once a week.  This means that you can’t host www.yoursite.com on 1&1 with your NNTP or FTP server somewhere else.

Other than that, their management console is pretty sharp.  It’s easy to set up permissions, passwords and the like for all your directories.  SSH access is provided too, for extra tweakage.