Pricing:  

1&1 Web Hosting requires the first year up front along with a $9.99 set up fee. Right now the first six months are charged at a reduced rate and the remaining six months at the full rate. Regular pricing ranges from $9.99 to $19.99 per month for hosting and $9.99 to $69.98 per month for their ecommerce solution eShops. Overall, their hosting prices are in the range of their competitors.

• 1 Year prepaid hosting - $75.87 (6 mo at 3.99 + 6 mo at 6.99 + 9.99 set up fee)
• 2 Year prepaid hosting - $159.75 (6 mo at 3.99 + 18 mo at 6.99 + 9.99 set up fee)
• 90-day money back guarantee

Registering or transferring one domain is free with the Beginner package; the Home includes two, Business three and Developer has five. Additional domains range from $8.99 to $29.99 for the first year, depending on the type you want.

Other services, such as a year of SSL protection is $49 per year. Other services are included at no additional cost such as 24/7 phone support and daily backups.
 

Hosting Features:  

This service rates well in terms of basic hosting features, though we would like to see larger memory allotments. The Beginner supports only 10GB, Home 150GB, Business 250GB and the Developer package 300GB, which is more than enough for most websites. However, many competitors offer unlimited memory. They do offer unlimited transfers, MS and Linux accounts and daily backups for all types of accounts, which are good things to have.

The web site builder is simplistic and incredibly easy to use, no coding knowledge is required, you pretty much just click items and add text. It can easily upload, store and organize your images and automatically resize images. When creating pages you can easily select things like fonts, colors, logos and banners and it is simple to enter search engine information like descriptions and keywords. The simple web page designer may not do enough for some people, but 1&1 can support pages created by other programs such as Dreamweaver.

They also offer traffic stats and provide vouchers for Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and City Search so you can start your campaigns right away for free. They are also compatible with Google Webmaster Tools.
 

Domains:  

As mentioned above, registering or transferring one domain is free with the beginner package; the home includes 2, the business 3 and the developer 5 with their packages. Additional domains range from $8.99 to $29.99 for the first year, depending on what type you want. They offer .biz, .com, .net, .org, .info, .us, .name, .ws, .cc, .mobi and .tv type domains. You can get privately registered domains, parked pages, subdomains (25-600) and host external domains (20-200). They also provide URL masking, also known as stealth redirection, which means visitors to one domain, can be forward to another website while the URL in their address bar will remain the same.

In terms of domains, this service offers just about everything we were looking for with the exception of international domains.