For the last few years, I have been using a Fasthosts dedicated Windows 2003 x86 server to run a number of different projects on, but I have always found that their proprietary Matrix control panel is very buggy and light on features to the point of being completely unusable for reselling space.
I recently found that 1&1 are doing some very nice Windows 2008 x64 Servers with 100MB connections, no explicit bandwidth cap and they come with Parallels Plesk Panel, which is pretty much the industry standard control panel for Windows. I’m still in the process of setting this up at the moment, and I have had a couple of annoyances from Windows 2008 x64, but that isn’t really 1&1‘s fault. They have been quite helpful and seem pretty eager to help, unlike Fasthosts who pretty much just said it was my fault whenever I reported a problem.
The main disadvantage of using 1&1 that I can see is that their datacentres are in Germany. The connection speed is perfectly good, but from the point of view of Google Local Search, this can be a little annoying as Google can mis-identify the country of a website. However, as far as I understand, Google checks the domain extension first (so if it is .uk it should be ok), and then if it can’t identify it from that, you can still override the IP check using Google Webmaster Tools.
Anyway, although I haven’t started using it properly, and I have been getting a bit annoyed with Windows 2008 x64, it does seem like a pretty good deal and I’m very happy with what I’ve seen so far. Oh yeah… they also have an affiliate program which is quite good