"1&1 last had an outage in January of 2007"
Major outage maybe, but there's been nothing but trouble since they upgraded the Debian on their shared servers the other week. Lots of niggly things I've had to contact them about recently, and their customer facing support staff although reasonably friendly have almost precisely zero technical knowledge about the products being sold. I used to strongly recommend 1&1 but cannot any more.
By the way, the times quoted for the outage appear to be German rather than UK time, given that (based on cron failures) our databases were unavailable from about 1.00pm until 2.15pm.