Get a Visual Tour Inside 1&1’s Massive Data Center

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Web hosting company invites us to Kansas to check out its 55,000 square-foot facility

To celebrate its 10-year anniversary in the United States, web hosting company 1&1 invited us to check out its sophisticated 55,000 square-foot data center in Lenexa, Kansas.
If you’re unfamiliar with 1&1, the company started in Germany in 1998 and focuses on helping people and small-to-medium businesses build websites. The company’s research shows that many small-to-medium companies want to build professional-quality sites, but are intimidated by the process.
When we met with 1&1, the company said that its straightforward "MyWebsite" content management system has gone a long way in streamlining this process for over 500,000 customers. This is quite impressive when you consider that this feature has been around for less than two years. Want to integrate e-shop apps, PayPal support, or social media integration on to your website? Simply drag and drop those supported apps on to your web page using the company's site-building tool. That is not to say the web hosting company doesn't support other content management systems, however. If you'd rather use Wordpress, Drupal, or other popular services and just wanted to register a web domain through 1&1, that's an option too. As a result of its business practices, 1&1 is now one of the largest web hosting companies in the world.
When we spoke with 1&1, the company said that the Internet landscape will really change in the next few years with over 700 new top level domains (TLDs) rolling out. This means that instead of seeing ".com" at the end of every website, you'll begin to see .music, .blog, .nyc, and more.
1&1 says that these new TLDs will bolster relevant search engine optimizations (SEO) and help local businesses with geo-location searches. To take advantage of this, 1&1 says that it has worked out an agreement to register these new TLDs from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It will be interesting to see how these developments affects the online landscape moving forward.
Regardless, the thing that got us most excited about 1&1 was being able to visit the company's high-tech data center. To get a glimpse of what it was like on the inside, check out our pics and descriptions below!


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