Those delightful people (sarcasm) at 1and1 Internet decided to lock my account for no reason and giving me no notice whatsoever that they were doing this. They have no unlocked it but I have no idea whether all my mail made it through, so for safety’s sake do resend it.

And now the question is whether I bother to change hosting provider or not. The problem is that while 1and1 is terribly mediocre (faux-hosting with unmanageable log-ins for FTP and Web access; a truly terrible web-based control panel for managing services; very limited shell access, basically none), the thought of spending a day or two moving half-a-dozen domains and a bunchof mailboxes freaks me out.
At the same time I have to balance the likelihood of 1and1 wilfully engaging in such a catastrophic outage in the near future. The reality is that having been this mindlessly incompetent, they are unlikely to be this bad in the near future.

Ultimately, the costs of switching are to great given the costs of my time and the marginal benefits of moving to a better hosting provider. (Those marginal benefits being better control panels, less anal mechanisms for setting up domains and mailboxes.) So even though they cost me the equivalent of decades of hosting with their outage yesterday, I guess I am stuck with them.

What I can do is warn the rest of you. Don’t use them. Hosting is one of those things–like a new mobile phone–which you can only really evaluate after you have invested way to much time. So take it from me, 1and1 offers a poor value, mediocre and cumbersome package of services. Find someone else.