Ecommerce Hosting:  

This is a real weak spot with this service. 1&1 Web Hosting does offer ecommerce packages; however, they do not offer many payment options. They aren’t set up to allow you to host your own payment gateway, though they can use things like Google Checkout and PayPal. Beyond their eShop product they are also compatible with the open source shop site tool OSCommerce.

Since this service does not support credit card payment gateways, beyond Google Checkout and PayPal, you have to rely on bank transfers, invoicing, COD, paperless checks and debit cards for payments. This really limits your payment options. We would also like to see more shopping cart options such as ZenCart or Magento.
 

Email:  

1&1 Web Hosting offers pretty good email tools including the support for POP3, IMAP and webmail type email protocols and you can get quite a few email accounts even with the beginner package which provides 600 and 800 email aliases. All packages come with 2GB of email storage and include spam protection, forwarding, auto responding and catch all email address support.

The business packages can support large email lists and addresses can be imported and exported as a CSV file. These packages can support up to 1000 emails per month and additional emails are only 99 cents per 1000 emails which is very cheap. Their 1&1 email marketing tool can help you easily create newsletters and text or HTML type emails. This tool also allows subscribe/unsubscribe, it can send test emails, track statistics and much more.
 

Access:  

This web hosting service provides a fairly easy to use control panel that gives you access to your pages, image files, publishing tools and more. It has a simple-to-use page builder and SSH support. In terms of FTP accounts, the Beginner package supports one; Home supports 10, Business 25 and the Developer 50. We did not see that it provided anonymous FTP ability but that is not too critical because there are ways around this.

Programming / Multimedia:  

This is another drawback in this web hosting product. It does not support streaming video or audio and you can’t add MIDI files. However, it does support basic programming protocols like Perl, CGI, PHP, ASP, FrontPage extensions, Flash files and MySQL.

Support & Service:  

1&1 Web Hosting offers 24/7 email and telephone support, no matter what package you choose. They also post tons of FAQs online that cover many topics. Through the web site creation tool you can access help to assist you with that specifically as well. The only things we would have liked to have seen are more step-by-step tutorials and perhaps chat support.

One of the best features of 1&1 Web Hosting is their super easy to use page builder. This is so simple that really anyone can use it and can be a real asset to a non-programmer. We also liked that they offer unlimited transfers, free 24/7 support and a good email package. We would like to see them amp up their ecommerce abilities and add streaming media ability.