The initial subjective review of MediaLayer has been posted. You can see the review here.

MediaLayer is a relatively new provider that focuses on quality servers, bandwidth and technical support although offering limited disk space and bandwidth compared to other shared hosting plans. If you are looking for impressive dynamic site performance then MediaLayer is well worth consideration.

The main testing engine is currently collecting data on a small number of hosts and undergoing evaluation. It is logging data on server TCP connection time and gross bandwidth rates for typical dynamic web pages and static data files.

After a (best guess) statistically significant number of samples are taken the results will be evaluated for testing engine consistency and margin of error. The main difficulty is evaluating and eliminating factors that skew results such as temporal testing node performance. After all if a node is not performing consistently the results it returns will also not be consistent. It may become necessary to add in a benchmarking feature to ensure more accurate and directly comparable results. A less preferred option would be to average a greater number of samples

Once the general trustworthiness and margin of error are determined, the system will be put into production and results will start to be shown at this site after a sufficient amount of data is collected. If operation is shown to be reliable and accurate, data will then be processed and published to this site in real time.

The bottom line is that you will be able to directly compare speeds and reliability of each hosting provider reviewed. The best assurance of the quality of a web hosting provider is seeing the real world performance.

The 1and1 hosting review has been removed.

1and1 is a well known low cost hosting provider. However they have collected a large number of negative reviews. The Better Business Bureau states that they have an “unsatisfactory record” due to unresolved claims. The negative customer reviews are generally centered on poor customer service and billing problems.

One web site claims to have done under cover research into customers being charged for services they did not order. The conclusion is that there is either a glitch in their system or the company is operating improperly. In any case their customer service did not acceptably resolve the problems.

For these reason the 1and1 web hosting review has been removed from this site. If you are looking for the lowest cost web host that still offers reliable service, please see this comparison.