Just a mini-review for anyone who thought about getting a shared hosting plan with 1&1 (www.1and1.com). I'm a complete noob to all this, so me sharing my experience with others should be a good start in this forum.
And please excuse my poor English. Not a native speaker.

I did a little digging around the web, looking for some inexpensive hosting and ended up with a list of potential candidates. 1and1 seemed to be a perfect choice, because of the price, space and bandwidth offered.
The registering process wasn't too painful. I had some questions, so I called their "Support" line. Quick, helpful and friendly -- very good impression!
My hosting plan, "1&1 Home", included 2 free domain names, so since I already knew what I wanted, I added one to my package. Entered all the required information and all that blah and submitted my order. On the next day I received an e-mail, requesting proof of legal residence in the US (?). So I scanned my Drivers License and attached to a reply. Shortly I received an email with an "All Green!"
So far so good.
Logged on to my new account, read through their FAQs, played around with the settings, changed default FTP account passwords, etc. At the control panel, everything is neat and very easy to access. I expected nothing less. Had some questions again, so I emailed Support and got a satisfying answer within 12 or so hours. But unfortunately, I am stuck with a really weird FTP access username that they assigned to me and which cannot be changed (a letter "u" followed by 8 digits).
Then I uploaded my website to the server (a "coming soon" page actually). After accessing my website with a "www." in front of my domain name, being a complete noob I stared at the 403 Error with a big question mark on my face. Back to FAQs. Ok, no problem there. All I need is to create a "www" subdomain. Did that, and within 3 hours the subdomain was registered and up and running.
The sky is blue, the grass is green.

All in all, I expected nothing more and nothing less. Everything is noob-friendly, support is helpful and friendly, and I am very much satisfied.

I'd give it a 9/10 (-1 for not exceeding my expectations, and just because nothing is perfect in this world)

I've been with 1&1 for a year or so and with one exception they've been fine. The exception was when there was some confusion about my account, I had a different name on my account from by credit card (Bob and Robert) and they blocked my entire account so all sites where down while I sorted it - massive over-reaction and I keep thinking about going elsewhere for my next domain but haven't so far.

I've been with 1 and 1 for about 9 months now and have had no problems, with the minor exception of their Dynamic Content which doesn't always update as it should.

I've had no trouble with using or not using "www" in a domain address. But all my domains hosted on my 1 and 1 "Home" account (8 of them) are registered elsewhere and all are pointed to subdirectories at 1 and 1. I only have a "keep out" graphic on the root of my file space. (http://s177285339.onlinehome.us/)

The fun with 1and1 usually comes when you want to move your site and domains to another host

Yep even I'm familiar with issues regarding the transfer of the site and domains if earlier it was with 1&1, but at the same time if a customer is happy with its service then there wouldn't be any need to do the transfers and so the sky will be blue and the grass will be green till then.