My personal site has been hosted on 1and1 forrrr probably about 6 or so years now.

It's had it's share of issues...all of the sigs went down for a few hours one day - but NO server is perfect. Most hosting companies offer 99.9% uptime - because 100% is impossible.

I would say that I'm reasonably satisfied with them. Customer service is not spectacular, because "Tom" from India will be taking care of you.

I rarely need tech support - so I rarely use it...most of my questions have been answered in their FAQ.

I have been looking more closely into HostGator lately - because I like cPanel.

One other flaw with 1and1 is they have a 100mb MySQL limit. They will NOT increase that space for you....but even still, 100mb is a lot...until you start hosting sites like BP.net. Moving this database around is skeery.