Yeh, sounds like a 1and1 ex customer there

... Trust me, I understand your position completely lol...
It's interesting though, when renting a dedicated server one generally gets full access as most of the time they're unmanaged; from what I understand about the 1and1 dedicated servers you get to use what they want you to use and nothing else.
1and1 constantly advertises in pcgamer and a bunch of other US magazines; I canceled my free hosting with them (the offered a free hosting deal for a while) and free wasn't even worth having to settle over their services...
Anyone know if 1and1 actually lets you manage domains that you've purchased through them now? When I bought 5 of my domains I had to basically harass their support staff for 6 months to allow me to transfer my domains to a real registrar that allowed some control over the contact information and ns servers (they expect you to use their services and only their services, when i contacted support they seemed dumbfounded that i wanted to use a differant webhost)...
HostNuke has a P4 3GHZ server for $189 with an option of 3 control panels (I'm slightly biased as I work on the support staff, but I went to HostNuke well before I worked there) and actually allows you full access to your server (with remote reboot should the server lock up).