Web design & hosting forum: Avoid 1&1 hosting service

I respect your outright hatred for this company - myself, I use internal email servers for my company, with forwarded email accounts from 1&1. Like I say - so far, so good, I can pre-order domains a week before being billed... I have externally monitored a 100% uptime from SiteProbe for the last 7 months on my own domain, which serves several other sites.

If you get a debit bill not approved email, sure - they shut you down - but it seems they give fair advance notice. As well - for DNS to be physically changed, or for all your accounts to be deleted - sounds malicious to me. I will admit - with a simple key logger software running, anyone could snag your password.

All in all - from the CGI Forms i utilize, to the 50+ FTP accounts i use... i choose 1&1.

I have run http://www.hawleywood.com - Hawleywood Interactive for 6 years and in all my experience have found them most reliable. And to say the least - it's not my first day at the rodeo.

Albeit - nothing beats an original in-house server with a nice 4-6mb backbone to serve your company online - I have several - all Windows Server 2003, which i like IIS.. NOTHING beats an in-house server you run yourself (given you know how to run it).

As for co-located/dedicated server offered by 3rd party vendor - go with 1and1.

If you don't pay them - you get shut down. If you happen to luck out with their 3month introductory trial - better have paid before your 3 month anniversary with them.

Night all!

If you are willing to stay on premahold for hours to fix their problems. If you want to deal with SLOW server response and clogged email acoounts. This is the cheap service for you.

Some people will recommend this sub-par hosting co. because they (1and1) give the recommenders refereal $$. See their affiliate program.

There customer service is horrible. Their servers are slow. They have other tech problems. There are much better options than 1and1

I don't think this guy should be extolling the virtues of 1 and 1 with his web site below

http://www.hawleywood.com

Check it out - its soooo sloooow.

LOL - most likely your dial up.. lol

i host a few hundred of my own domains, and do reseller hosting, and have tried numerous hosts for such. i've ended up with ourinternet.us for past 2.5 years.
excellent plans, very good quality.
1and1 ABSOLUTELY sux. u will regret using them. GUARANTEED.

For anyone tracking this -- I use DreamHost now Mainly for the plethora of diversity they allow on dedicated server systems.

1&1 was reliable - but not dynamic enough to meet the needs of a programmer/developer

UPDATE!

Its obvious you don't do this for a living. Thanks for the insult however - i think you're mebbe using the least used browser on earth which is Opera as you quote in YOUR own website: www.one-tweak-loop.com - "Opera is the browser I use most often"

My company prides itself on being customer-obsessed rather than being self indulging. With a layered client list and as a major outsourcer to some of the largest media companies in canada - i can afford your flack.

I must say that even though you have DSL that doesn't mean everything just goes poof. most times sites dont just go poof and appear. Anyway - as much as id like to debate the article with you - i feel you would lack the true substance which warrants a meritable discussion on this topic.

All i see on your site is basic HTML and basic (albeit clean) .css - do you have any PHP or Python or heck, Perl you want to debate?

See you in the big leagues.

PS - Your site burns my eyes.
--
Mr. Hawleywood

Before setting up my site, I sent emails with questions to my "finalists". One reason is because, anymore, companies don't tell you anything outright, & also to see how they fair in Customer Service.

The first email I didn't even get a response to, and the second came AFTER I gave up on them and set a site up somewhere else. Great help!

Anyway, what you all of you recommend, as far as cheap, reliable web hosting? CHEAP & RELIABLE are the operative words. I know register.com is well talked of, but they charge an arm, leg, and first born for their services!

What do you all use?

I made the unfortunate mistake of becoming a 1&1 customer. Until I became a customer, I had perfect credit, that is before my 1&1 credit card expired. The email address I gave changed during my subscription, so of course I did not receive the promised reminders. Rather than canceling my subscription due to the expired card, they automatically renewed it and sent my information to a collection agency within 2 weeks of the payment due date. No phone call, no snail letter, nothing

Immediately after receiving the letter from the collection agency, I called 1&1, paid the debt, and closed my account. Did they bother to tell the collection agency this? NO WAY! I recently preformed a credit check; the only tick on my account is from NCO FIN/99 which states that Im Seriously Overdue for 3+ months. After waiting on hold for 30 minutes, the so called customer service agent promised to email me a note stating that my account is in good standing within 10 minutes of hanging up so that I can attempt to repair my credit. Its been hours, and still no note.

Avoid them at all costs! They have no idea what customer service is or how to do it! They are an absolute nightmare to deal with!!!!!!

When a company doesn't respond to the customers, saying it 'has poor support' is a compliment. It should have been 'no customer support.'

And that's my experience with www.1and1.com.

Last November I ordered their hosting plan. The first thing I tried was to setup FTP accounts for my family. To my total surprise, I can't assign user names at my will! Every ftp name I set, 1and1 automatically prefixed it with a long weirdo number. For example, ''john'' would become ''u31312068-john''. In order to login a user needs to remember all this stupid long number that is meaningless to him.

I don't know what people think about it but to me it's not acceptable. I sent an email to support@1and1.com right away to complain and ask if there's any way to get rid of that junk.

More than 1.5 months past yet I got absolutely no response from them. Several days ago I got 2 emails from them, at first I thought finally they realized that there is a paid customer who needs help. But hell no! Those emails were their advertisement and survay, bragging about how good their services are !! How ironic to see the email started with ''As a valued 1&1 customer, your opinions are important to us'' ! Oh, yea ...

I have been using www.icdsoft.com for 3 years. They have an amazingly quick response to customers' question s -- all requests are answered in one hour. In my 3-year experience I asked many questions yet never once had one left unanswered for more than a hour. Yesterday I just asked a question and in 40 minutes I had exchanged 4 emails with them (2 from each side).

I also checked out www.bluehost.com that I might consider ordering. Same, exchanging 4 emails in one hour.

With the efficiency like this around, the so-called support from 1and1 is really a joke.

I wish I had never tried their offer. Now, after reading the comments in this thread, I am wondering where my 'get-my-money-back' journey will lead me to. As for those who are willing to pay 1and1 and 'do their quality assurance' for them, I would say: may God be with you.

This is a warning to anyone considering using 1and1 for dedicated server hosting.

We signed up for two servers with 1and1 , and we were working on the assumption that 1and1 support is almost non existant (Which is very true).

We are Microsoft Gold Partners , and have extensive OS and hardware experience.

I signed up on the basis we would not need 1and1 support for anything other than a physical hardware fault.

When we had a physical hardware fault it took 1and1 3 days ! to replace a stick of memory.

When the server came back the OS had somehow been corrupted.

The 1and1 windows recovery system didnt work (1and1 suggested we use a linux emergency recovery) , but as we have no linux experience this was about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

The Serial console access , also didn't allow us to press f8 for DS restore mode or safe mode (from which we could have recovered the OS).
(essentially rendering the serial console access useless).


So all the "safety features" 1and1 offered didnt work correctly , essentially leaving us with one option and that was to do a clean install of the OS , (Which fortunately does work from 1and1 control panel).

we now have a day or so's work to recover the server just because the 1and1 service is so bad. so all in all 3 days + downtime for our customers.

My complaint to 1and1 customer support was never answered (2 months+)
There is no online ticket system to track issues.
If you leave an issue with 1and1 support they will not resolve the problem.
If you call regularily to get problems resolved you might as well be speaking with a monkey , as you would get a similar response.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS , YES THEY ARE CHEAP BUT you will pay for it in customer dissatisfaction (Unless this server is going to be used for something completely non critical - ie you can wait up to 1 week for it to be fixed , and you have the time to rebuild the server whenever there is an OS issue.

(I did research before signing up , and thought that due to our technical skills and experience we could ignore the support issues with 1and1 but this was not the case as there are times when hands on server access is needed (especially when most of the 1and1 tools offered for server recovery do not work).

You have been warned.

the ABSOLUTE WORST registrar on the planet (& probably other planets, too, which is where there customer support staff come from).
Don't give these guys your c/c number or you'll regret it for a long time.
Hidden auto-renewal policy, try to not renew and see what happens.
Try even contacting billing dept., and see if you can get through.

What the heck? Are you all newbies or something? You WANT your domains to be renewed every year. After registering a domain, and starting a meaningful site, there should be no reason for you to ever drop a domain. You should either
a) Keep maintaining and updating your website or
b) Keep the site in existance if you're unable to keep updating it for some reason.

I'd *never* register a domain with anyone who didn't auto-renew my domains before the expiration.

Our company has been using a managed server at 1&1 for about 18 months now and have mixed feelings about them. We like the features they offer and the user friendly admin control panel, which along with the price make it a compelling choice. However, we also have 25 email accounts set there and have experienced annoying instability for the last year. Like the previous comments, emails have recently been delayed from hours to up to a day. Since email is a primary form of communication for us, it is quite disruptive. Considering that email is a commodity service now, I don't understand why they have so much trouble with it.

In addition, there are apparently many 1&1 customers who are known spammers, which can prevent our corporate emails from reaching external addresses (like our customers) because their email filters/blocks emails coming from 1&1 addresses (known to listed on many a blacklist).

So, if DNS propogation wasn't so lengthy and painful, I would switch us over to another vendor. However, the thought of switching to a vendor with potentially the same problems is holding me back from switching right now.

For now, I'm just wishing they get their act together.

Dear J. Hawley

I don't know what to say but it seems that i can't see your website is it down or is it something wrong with my internet provider?

So i gues you were saying something that your site is always running.