Labs

The 1&1 Home package provides 1.5GB of storage space for your website, with a monthly data transfer limit of 20GB. This is more than adequate for a home or small business website. Like most of the packages here, a .co.uk domain name is also included but, unlike most of the others, it's free as long as you stick to this particular deal.

The Home package comes with 400 email accounts, five of which have full spam filtering and anti-virus protection. These can be accessed either through POP or IMAP using an email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or directly by webmail on the 1&1 website.

Getting your site online is easy using either

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FTP or the online file manager, but there's no support for FrontPage extensions. If you're not sure where to start, you can use the limited versions of WebsiteBuilder and DynamicSiteCreator to create HTML and Macromedia Flash pages. These tools enable you to create only a limited number of pages, and don't provide the full range of templates. You can buy the full versions of these tools as extras, but doing so will double the cost of the package. There are also tools to help you add blogs, e-commerce content and photo galleries, and some basic CGI scripts for forums, guest books and feedback forms.

The proprietary administration interface is excellent. It's clean, simple and easy to navigate, and displays context-specific help on all pages. It integrates domain, email and account administration as well as offering access to a useful range of marketing tools for search engine optimisation.

The Home package lacks SQL support and doesn't handle Perl scripts. A Windows version is available for a little more and comes with FrontPage extensions but lacks .NET or Access support. Still, this is a reasonable starter bundle, and for many the wide range of extras will more than make up for the lack of SQL database support.