1&1 Internet – Office Drive

I signed up for 1&1 Internet Office Drive today. It is a “cloud” drive that lets you store up to 2 gigs on the 1and1 servers.

I have been using 1and1 for hosting for 6 or 7 years now. They are not the fastest or fanciest hosting company, but they are consistent and inexpensive.

I don’t like that they don’t use a more conventional interface to manage their features and I don’t like that some of their tools seem clunky to use.

What I do like is that they are seldom down. Every once in a while I notice that they’ve been out for an hour or so, but usually before I call, the site comes back. I don’t expect 100% up time from anyone, but I do like it when the site comes back quickly after a crash.

I have had other hosts and like them, but when money got tight, I consolidated my websites at 1and1 and have had no reason to regret it.

You may have noticed that 1and1 has been advertising lately. This may be a good thing. They have to keep adding cool features in order to keep ahead of the competition.

Office driveĀ  is part of a productivity suite that comes free when you have a 1and1 account. The tools are by ZOHO, which is a neat little company competing with Google Office apps. What makes 1and1’s productivity suite special is that it comes with 2 gigs of online storage and a program to turn the storage into a virtual drive. My “M:” drive is now on the 1and1 servers.

Office Drive is not free – you have to have a 1and1 hosting account. Their web hosting starts at $5 a month, which is about average for budget hosts. I have a $10 a month business package which allows me to host my 50+ websites with one account.

I am using Office Drive now to store my programming projects and my web development data. I have about a gig of stuff that I am going to offload from my hard disk and share between work and home. There is an android app that lets you access the data from a tablet, but I am still waiting for the right price on a tablet. There is an iPad app that I will install on Justine’s iPad.

So far it has worked for me, but not flawlessly. I am copying large amounts of data onto the drive and it seems slow. It crashed once, reporting that the disk was full, but the error was really that it had lost the connection somehow.

The Web Desk login to control the productivity apps has crashed twice giving me error screens written in German. That’s not good.

Since the product is new, I expect that it will be a little buggy at first. I will see how well it works by exercising it over the next few weeks. If I give up on it, I will let you know.

There is one thing that worries me. The system has a 4 gig limit on bandwidth. If I fill up the 2 gigs of space I might not be able to access it for long because I might use up my bandwidth. I am afraid that my virus scans will hit the disk and cause me to blow the bandwidth. We’ll see.

1&1 Internet.