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Date Submitted :
January 5th, 2012
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 3 years
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
4 out of 5
Support :
1 out of 5
Pricing :
3 out of 5
Verdict :
1 and 1 definitely has the worst customer service of any company that I have been dealing with. Their Tech Support people in the Philippines cannot resolve anything except the simplest issues. They are just message takers and you have to wait for a few days to get email message help from their real tech support and if that does not resolve the issue, you have to start all over again.
My current issue is that they charged my account for $160 in error and after about 3 weeks of trying to get it resolved, I called my bank and they processed a credit for it, later, 1 and 1 issued a credit and the bank reversed their entry. 1 and 1 locked my account and now require me to sign a false statement that the charges were authorized in order to get the account restored.
1 and 1 is the worst company that I have ever dealt with, without a doubt.
I am a Dedicated Server user of 1and1.com since 2008 and also bought some domains through 1and1.com. I just want to share my own experience with 1and1.com here.
So far I never experience problems as described here. Most of the problems I read here deal with share web hosting and VPS hosting.
If it is true that 1and1.com has million of clients and there is 1% complain of unhappy customers, to my understanding that is still very good performance as we can not make everybody happy. I do not know how many % of their customers are happy customers though.
However, I do hope that 1and1.com is listening the experiences of their ex -customers here to improve their support service team from time to time, to reduce complain rates.
They promised an easy system, what i got was a useless (cheap) system which needed upgrade at every turn to make even a basic website work. I am new to website building and i don't know what I don't know (if you know what i mean). 1and1 feed off that and make you feel stupid while paying them to tell you how stupid you are!
DO NOT USE 1and1.com! It's the worst hosting company!
They have terrible software and customer service! They made it so difficult to cancel the packages! They kept kicking me back and forth between two departments more than 5 times just to cancel one package; each department kept kicking me back to the other department and said the other department was the right department. I had to keep calling several departments many times without getting things fixed. They kept telling me that my package would be unlocked within 1 hour. No! 8 hours passed, my package was still locked; they still kept saying it would be unlocked in 1 hour. I could never talk to a manager!
Their customer service is based overseas; they are polite but very poorly trained! I had to keep calling in and repeating myself for 30 minutes for one simple question without getting things right!
IT'S BEEN A NIGHTMARE USING 1AND1.COM
STAY AWAY FROM IT!
Horrible company. Worst service ever!!!! I wouldn't waste my time writing bad about any company BUT! this one is so horrible that it's worth 1-2 minutes to spend to let the other people know. NEVER go with them because you will waste your time, money and your business will not prosper with them. I had to cancel my domains with them 5 (five times) also I had to call and ask them to do one simple thing on my account for 7 (seven) times. Very bad service and unsatisfactory results Hope I won't have to call them again.
P.S> why don't they have ) out of 5 option. They would fit to my mind!
In short their service is fine when everything is working which it does most of the time. Their big problem is when things go wrong! You can waste hours engaged in meaningless conversation with their support operatives! These operatives are seriously robotic and read from scripts. Trust me that isn't what you want when you have problems with your web services and you are looking for some reassurance that the problem is firstly understood and secondly being dealt with!
We have had issues supposedly raised to high priority support and still heard nothing for days. We have finally decided to go through the pain of looking for a new ISP. First on the list of wants is a support team that are based in the UK.
1and1 is THE WORST DECISION I TOOK IN MY INTERNET LIFE! I bought three VPS virtual private servers to host my customers websites and during 6 months each server crashes at least 4 times and I had to re-image and re install everything, the backup didn't work either, this people doesn't even know how to configure Windows VPS, they don't have a clue what is IIS, if you don't want to lose your customers don't use this company ever, support is the worst.
I've been a customer for over three year, they just cancelled my account because the verification code on my credit card was wrong. I owed them $9. I had 11 domains with them and have been a paying customer for over three years.
The billing group said that they no longer want my business, and that I could take it elsewhere.
Support is mediocre at best
Pricing is higher than that of namecheap.com
The domain management interface is the worst I've seen to date.
I had stayed with them for a while because it's a pain to move domains from one registar to another and setup the websites.
I don't recommend them and will never use them again.
My customer has had this domain hosting account for six days. Now granted my customer lost the login information, so this is mostly about their support.
At 11:10pm I called their support team to get the login and password information. I was gave them my customers account information and was able to get the customer ID. Went to their customer portal and requested a password reset link. So far so good.
At 11:30 pm I had not received the password reset link so I called their support team and was advised that it could take up to six hours for the reset link to come via email. Well I kind of lost it and I explained that I have work that I need to do (mainly udate some DNS server records) because I have a customer waiting to bring their new Exchange server online. He told me to call back in 1 hour if I had not received the password email link.
At 12:27 am I called back and I explained that I had not yet received the password email link. I was put on hold straight away and as I waited I knew this was going to be big problem. She came back on the line and told me that they were having trouble sending email to comcast.net. Too be honest I lost it. I explained to her that the first support should have known this one hour ago and they just wasted one hour of my time. I then asked was their backup solution and she stated that the password reset link could be sent to another email address. OK I am cool with that because just about everyone has a free email account service somewhere.
OK This is where I 1000% lost it. She said she would direct me to a website where I can downlaod the email address change request. OK I am still cool and then I asked how long this would take and she stated it would take 5 business days. Folks I think I had a mini stroke right then and I mean I let her have it. I asked her if she understood how stupid this was and she could only tell me its sor security reasons and thir policy.
I was completly mad as heck now and I asked her what I need to do to cancel this account and she stated I would have to call a number and I asked if they were open at this time and of course the answer was no.
I have been working in I.T. for 12 years and I have never, ever done business with a company that is this sad and if there is a business God, he should put them out of their misery. There is no excuse for the lack of experience on their support desk and I just figured out what it is. Its not a lack of expereince, its a lack of not caring.
Stay away from this place by any means. The cheap price only gets you poor service and support. Also, I would love to see some replies from the people that work their in these types of forums.
I've been in customer service 30 years and I have never dealt with such a disappointing company. The worst support department EVER. Do NOT use this company, at any price. TOTALLY unacceptable performance. Purchased a do-it-yourself website and I can't access the page 90% of the time. Can't upload a photo. A complete ripoff of titanic proportion. I can't believe a publication as professional as Inc. Magazine would ever allow advertisement by such fraudulent scammers as 1and1,
1and1.com is a joke. They are now advertising on TV which I suppose is an attempt to increase business. Don't understand though, because they can't even handle their current load of customers. Their customer service is cold and slow. There DNS changing processes is turtle slow (min 48 hours). The control panel is subpar and often has glitches. AND TO TOP IT OFF THEY DELETED A WORKING DOMAIN OF OURS WITHOUT ANY PERMISSIONS FROM US. AND GET THIS - THEY DELETED IT TO TRANSFER IT TO THE SAME EXACT SERVER IT IS ON. NOW WE'VE BEEN DOWN FOR A TOTAL OF ABOUT 20 DAYS because of things they have done or not done and major glitches with their servers - like the inability to reset one of our servers because their system was awry.
1and1 is the worst hosting company anyone wants to associate with --- too many down time and take too long to fix it. Besides, their tech support persons are either clueless or useless. Stay away from this provider or you will get burned
Add me to the list of EX 1and1 Internet, Inc customers.
I had been a customer with them for 14 years. A failed payment, which I updated immediately and they still sent me to collections turned off my sites and 2 months later after sending a money order I'm still trying to get me sites turned back on.
Beware if you're looking for a website hosting company internet services provider 1and1 Internet is terrible. They customer support is awful, their control panel is slow and buggy. They do have competitive prices but it is NOT worth it. I wish I would have switched but just never got around to it. Now I am 50k sorry as that is what is has cost me in all my lost sales.
Again if don't want a website hosting company or internet service provider that gives you poor service, gut you when their systems fail then run to a company that values their customers.
We went with 1and1.com for our exchange host. Most of the time the service is fine and flawless. The reason for the low ratings is due to their problem management. We are currently into a 2 week (so far)run with virtually no service. Their customer support says nothing but 'We will e-mail the admins to find out an estimated time on repair'. I have heard that for 14 running days yet no fix and no answer.
Dont take me wrong, the people are polite enough but its blatantly obvious they have no idea whats going on and even more obvious they dont care.
Take-a-way: Decent service when it works, when something breaks 1and1 truly stinks.
Terrible interface, bad customer service. You will never find a way to cancel you account, they really make it impossible and thanks to their automatic renewal policy you will keep paying forever.
This is absolutely the worst company I have ever dealt with in 30 years in business. I have had 'at best' 90% uptime in the 8 months I've been with them. Their tech support is completely atrocious. The idiots doing support don't have a clue what they are doing and refuse to escalate cases to anyone who does know. Recently, the control panel was either down completely or running so slow it was unusable for 2 solid weeks! Tech Support's answer - it was 'scheduled maintenance', which by the way, they never notified anyone of. As I write this, ALL of my web sites have been down for going on 24 hours, I've opened three trouble tickets, I've tried to walk the idiots through the error message which is clearly showing an IIS/Server error and not a 'site/programming' error. And I still can't get them to escalate the case to their server team. I'm fed up and done with this awful excuse for a company. DO NOT HOST YOUR SITES HERE... the trade-off for cheap is the crappiest support in the world. Honestly... I have never experienced a company that treats customers worse!
I've been hosting with 1and1 for about 7 years now. They've had some growing pains in the past when the created new data centers but overall they're quite good. I host multiple sites with them and their features are good and getting better. They just increased the MySql DB size from 100MB to 1000MB at no extra charge. I've tried others in the past but ended up going back to 1and1. I host about 10 sites w/them.
I'm a WordPress Developer that has clients who use many various web hosting companies. I attempt to prescreen hosting solutions before starting any work, just to make sure that they have some sort of Easy Installation Script for WordPress. This allows me to keep my rates as low as possible for my customers. When I investigated 1and1 for my client, it looked like they would have no issue handling our needs. That was 5 days ago, and we are currently no closer to a resolution.. or having a working web site.
So what happened?
5 days ago I received the 1and1.com account information from my client, and informed them that I would get started right away. I logged into the 1and1 account. The response time of the site was far worse than I am used to, even with GoDaddy, but I could live with it. I won't be in there long anyway. Once I learned my way around user interface, I figured out how to open up their hosting "contract". By now I realized that they do not use a standard control panel. Everything is configured through their terrible user interface, and WordPress is installed through their "Click & Build" applications.
Installation seemed pretty straight forward, so I fired off a single WordPress installation on a brand new hosting account. Once the page refreshed, the status changed to "Is getting installed". After 4 hours, I was still greeted with the same exact message, so I decided it was time to call support.
I have since spent 5 days on the phone with 1and1 tech support. I can only say that their support is dismal, awful, terrible, and I don't really have enough adjectives without breaking into my thesaurus.
Here are some of my highlights..
I have been told that this was no real issue, that I just had to uninstall the current WordPress and then reinstall. I explained that I has tried that approach, so they told me that they would initiate the uninstall on their end. All I had to do was wait, then reinstall once the uninstall was complete. That was 5 days ago..
I was told in another call that this would be escalated to their "administrators" and they would uninstall the WordPress App by hand and get back to me when this was complete. I never heard anything from anyone.
Another call, I was told that they couldn't understand my frustration, all I had to do was go to the website and log in, then I could uninstall WordPress myself, and reinstall. I asked if she had even read the notes for the support reference number that I gave her. We have already tried that. I was told the issue would be escalated and that I would receive an email once it was fixed.
Another call, I was told that the tech was going to go talk to the "administrators" himself, and he would be back with a real answer. After about 30 minutes he came back to tell me that this was an issue that is effecting many of their customers. They knew about it and were working as quickly as possible to fix the issue. He understands my frustration and promised that he would escalate the case, and that he personally would be following closely. He told me that he personally would be email an update within an hour, and that I would receive an email with some explanation or update every hour on the hour, until resolved. I have NEVER received a single email from them. Well, except for the emails they immediately sent to let me know about a SALE they had on hosting services.
Another call and I was told that this is a known issue again. They had no new information and I had been told that I would receive an email when they had more information.
There were other calls, but they have been circling in the same cycle. After 5 days without a usable website, the account is still "locked up" and when you try to browse to the URL you are greeted with a "403 Forbidden" error.
On my last call about 30 minutes ago and 5 full days after I started this grand adventure, I was put on hold for a time, and when the "tech" (I use that term VERY loosely here)came back she told me that she had escalated the issue. They were aware on the problem, but they had no estimate for a time when this would be resolved. She told me, "It could be tomorrow or the next day, I really have to time frame to give you". I asked if there was any way to just move this account to another server that wasn't having this issue, or something similar. She said, "NO, this is already escalated to their "administrators", there is nothing further that she can do.I politely explained that this is just completely unacceptable. If this had been one of their clients with an existing site, the site would now be down for 5 days with no real answers as to when it would be back again. She actually hung up on me. Even as frustrated as I am, I was extremely polite, knowing that the script reader techie couldn't actually fix anything and that it wasn't actually the fault of the person I was talking to. I was left dumbfounded...
I have just called my client explaining the situation and to give them an update. They are moving to a new host, as I type this. Thank God!
I now have more hours in TRYING to get the hosting account set up than I had actually intended for the entire design process. Yet, I'll honor my pricing to the client, and start over with a new host..
I would stay very far away from 1and1 hosting services if I were you. I have no intentions of ever building a site hosted by them, it costs too much time, money, and frustration. It just isn't worth it.
I am a web designer and one day out of the blue I noticed that all of my website (and customer websites) were offline. I tried to log into my account, but was unable. I then called tech support and they forwarded me over to billing, billing then forwarded me to the fraud department. I was told that my websites were taken offline because I was sending massive amounts of spam through them. I let them know that this was not me that was doing so, but that someone must have hacked my account. I asked them if they would send me a list of the affected files and I will gladly fix the issue. They did send me an email within a few hours with the affected files.
At that time, I fixed the said issues and my websites were then brought back online. Within a couple of business days I received an email from 1&1 stating that they will be terminated my account in 30 days of the email being sent because of the fraud.
That day, I found a new webhost (HostMantis.com) who only charged me $12.00 (US) for an entire year, unlike 1&1 who charged me $5.00 (US) per month.
I moved over all of my websites the very next day and tried to change the DNS settings within the 1&1 control panel, but it gave me a generic error every single time. I was then forced to call their out-sourced technical support team. I have always had a horrible time with their technical support team because of the language barrier so I tried to never call them. They told me that I was doing something wrong and tried to walk me through step by step, since I have done this hundreds of times before they didn’t teach me anything new. After letting them know that I was still getting the error, they attempted to do it for me and that’s when they noticed the error themselves. The rep. told me that he would escalate this issue to another team that was only accessible via email so he would need to end the call to continue my “support”. Needless to say, it took them about 5 days to point my domains (5 days is the typical turnaround time for technical issues).
This email of termination was sent just a couple of days after my 6 month payment was supposed to be received. My credit card on file expired and I forgot to update it so they were unable to charge me. I received a letter in the mail stating that I owe almost $40.00 for my hosting package and one domain name. I purchased the domain name through their website for what it said was $4.99, but now they are trying to charge me $8.99 along with the full 6 months of hosting, when they are only allowing me to use 30 days of hosting before they will be locking me out of my own account.
1&1 Hosting is a complete scam and now that I am reading more reviews about their service, this same issue is happening almost on a daily basis with other customers. Looking at the BBB website, 1&1 Internet has had 385 complains closed within the past 12 months, which means at least 1 person a day is being scammed by this company. Please don’t let it be you!
If I worked for a company that had one complaint a day, we would have surly gone under many years ago. My company and I pride ourselves on offering the best customer service possible and are more than willing to work with customers if they ever do have issues. I am crossing my fingers that one day enough people will have heard about the crazy, laziness and fraud that 1&1 Internet offers their customer base and that they will be forced to close their doors.
I have never been happier with my new “mom & pop” web host. They’re all American and respond to all of my inquiries within an hour or less.
Since this issue (within the past 2 weeks) I have moved about a dozen of my clients away from 1&1 and will continue to do so for years to come. Who wouldn’t want to save money and receive better service?!
Buyer beware when using 1&1 web hosting! You’re going to be in for a world of hurt at one point or another.
My account never functioned as promised, in that it never allowed addition of "external" domains. Each time I called tech support they said it was a known problem, that many customers were experiencing it, and that they had no known resolution time.
This service offering never functioned as advertisted, and 10 days later it still does not work, and again with no resolution time.
Of course they charged me anyway for a full year's hosting.
After working with many hosting services over many years, this is the worst experience I have ever had. I would not recommend this service to others.
if you ever Imagined have domains in one package for manage and tried to making it in each one by it self for any purpose and you can't and asking with several email support and you can't if you understand basic of what it a domain. also,now i try to transfer and i can't with second one 101domain.com told me when and 1an1 say to me your domain it lock while i see my domain it unlock. way! before that a 1an1 girl i talk made a statistic air by phone and she can't hear me and hang off me so i call again and 1and1 guy talked very loud asking me ask your other registrar to star the transfer or if was like that. finally, it a period of time to transfer so i am looking for options and i found this site.
Among other things, my main grievance with 1&1 is chronic OVERCHARGING! These guys seem to be experts at fraudulently charging my credit card and absolutely REFUSE to reimburse my Visa for what they take. For instance, 1&1 had a $5.99 .com domain sale and a .99 cent .Info domain sale recently and I went ahead and registered 20 .com's and 5 .info names.
So the final receipt screen showed 1&1 charged my credit card $5.99 per .com domain and .99 cents per .info as advertised. When my credit card statement arrived the next month, I was shocked to discover 1&1 had in reality, deceptively charged me the FULL PRICE of $8.99 for .com's and $8.99 for the .info's, so I had like $224.75 billed to my card!!!!
Since I had taken screenshots (they do not email you an invoice or receipt upon domain name purchase) I had a gut feeling some nonsense like this would crop up. 1&1 has become more and more unethical over the years and defrauding customers is their normal mode of operation.
I did complain (via a harsh, lawsuit threatening email) and received a boilerplate response that their "system" erroneously overcharged me for all the domains I had ordered (if that were true, why didn't they ever try to contact me or remedy the situation or alert me they would reverse the overcharges along with an apology, because had I not spotted the error on my monthly credit statement or written them a threatening letter about it, I have a feeling they would have done nothing!)
Its been 4 months and I still have yet to receive that elusive refund on the overcharge error I was promised, they admitted guilt and have done nothing to rectify their system error. Now I'm convinced these people are liars, cheats and crooked deadbeats. I probably should have listened to that System Admin from Xerox who warned me about 1&1 saying, "1and1.com, DO NOT DEAL WITH THEM, YOU WILL BE SORRY IN THE END, THE SERVICE HAS BEEN ON A DOWNWARD SPIRAL FOR QUITE A WHILE."
Now, today I get this email from 1&1 stating that they are raising the rates on all domain names and renewals by a buck, and are doing so in order to stay competitive! Huh?? How would raising your rates make you more competitive?? Just try to figure out that logic?? Here is the email warning letter explaining the coming price hikes:
1&1 Internet Inc. deeply appreciates your business and we truly hope you are satisfied with our services.
...
"Dear Sir,
We are writing today to inform you that, due to circumstances beyond our control, it has become necessary for us to raise rates for some domains. In order for 1&1 to stay competitive in the marketplace and continue offering you the excellent customer service you get, we have been forced to make necessary changes to our pricing structure in order to serve you better.
For all domain name renewals and any new orders as of 07/01/2011, the following domain rates will apply:
.com, .net, .us, .org, .info, .biz domains will be increased from $8.99 per year to no less than $9.99 per year (not including ICANN fees, which is a mandatory fee charged by Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers.)
The new price for all ( 173 ) of your domain(s) registered and parked with 1&1 will be applied to all domain renewals occurring on or after July 1, 2011.
1&1 is absolutely committed to offering you professional domain services at the most competitive prices possible and we hope to continue to meet and exceed your customer service expectations."
...
Time to find a new Registrar and bulk-domain parking, any ideas?
I have been with them for more than 5 years.
First my webdevelopers complain about the time it takes to respond to simple questions and their slow in upgrade.
The major problem I noticed in the last 12 months is the complete breakdown of technical support. If you are not a serious technical guy, this is not a hosting company to go for.
Price may be great, but you will pay for it in phone calls and sitting down for 24hours waiting for technical support.
Not having a chat messaging system makes them look ancient.
I've been a customer of 1and1.com since 2004. Have 3 domains with them. Previously they were also my hosting company but now just my domain providers. I had a past due balance of $59 from 2009 which I was unaware of and when my domain came due they did not send me anything in writing and canceled the account to ensure the past due balance got paid. Needless to say, if I was made aware in writing I would have paid the amount in questioned. Which I don't even know how they have a past due balance of $59 but whatever. Now my business it out of commission until my website and emails are back up and each week it is 3 to 5 business days. Needless to say - they have effected my livelihood. I am looking for others who would like to get involved in a class action suit against 1and1.com. Please reply if so and provide your story.
Domains I no longer needed they sent me to collections after claiming to contact me via phone email and mail.That never happened. If they did call me it was not clear why and I do not recall the message.
They have a hidden auto renew link that needs to be removed and if your card on file is not valid when they want to auto renew you it goes to collections.
So now i have a hit on my credit due to this and they are cold and not caring even as i was interested in upgrading my account.
Forget these guys. There is a nicer web world out there.
I may have rated 1and1.com here before, but I just learned something new and stupid about them that potential victims should know. When you want to transfer a domain away from 1and1.com, they force you to unlock the domain. Other domain registrars will email you to confirm the transfer is legit. 1and1.com freely tells you that if you unlock your domain, they will transfer it to anyone who asks without checking with the owner. This represents a completely unnecessary risk of loss of your domain. Every other registrar can transfer a domain without completely giving up on security. This is another in a long list of grievances including a pattern of outright fraud. Friends don't let friends buy from 1and1.com
The best thing about 1and1 is their price. It is difficult to converse with Customer support and often the answer is 'no you cannot'.
The control panel is confusing. The recent CP upgrade is really confusing assembling vastly different features and functions under labels that are misleading with no way to get 'home' except to re-access the cp.
Often simply logging in is the biggest challenge. I often copy/paste ID and PW in then fail - only to work moments later.
Lately their domains have been blacklisted which is a whole new bucket of fun.
I've had no problems as far as downtime, but like others have found their customer service and billing to be beyond horrible. Consistently overbilled, and suspect this is intentional. If you don't thoroughly check your invoices they take advantage. When you have an issue their response is to give you the link to their "cancel" page, which I'm now going to take advantage of (long overdue). Worse yet, I'm an affiliate and they don't pay your commissions and don't respond when you ask about it. Worse yet, I've got clients there that I also have to move. Stay FAR, FAR away from 1and1.
I've had my domain name parked here for several years, and haven't had any problems with just that, and funneling email to me.
Tonight, however, I went to add some other domains and ran into some problems. I didn't realize when I placed the order that I wasn't going to be presented with a payment screen, and the order just went through without offering me the option to make the registrations private. The domains in question *must* be private, for all kinds of reasons.
I spent more than *an hour and a half* fighting with customer service and most of it on hold waiting for a supervisor to try to fix the problem. I got one after about half an hour, but she must have pushed a mute button, because she couldn't hear me, and then hung up on me. I called back twice, and still couldn't get through to anyone who could help.
The worst part is the idiots I spoke to didn't even answer my questions. They answered whatever they wanted to say, whether it had anything to do with what I was asking or not. Or they sat there silent, saying nothing at all. Or kept asking me the same questions over and over again after I told them I still needed to speak to a supervisor. I finally asked the last one where he was located - and his answer was "Yes".
One kept using the same answer to clarify something I didn't understand. He mentioned "unlocking" the domain, and when I asked what that meant, he said, "You know, *unlocking*, as in unlock". Over and over. Without ever explaining what it meant.
I kept asking over and over and over again for a supervisor, telling them I didn't want to repeat the problems I was having, and the only answer I got was "What is the problem?" and "There's no supervisor", or "They can't talk to you now". The story kept changing - but the bottom line is I never did reach a supervisor.
The second time I got put on hold, by Andre', I didn't even get their terrible Muzak, just a hissing sound, so I think they just shunted me off to some black hole on hold where no one would have ever answered. I finally hung up after 39 minutes.
On the third call, Dan wouldn't even put me on hold to even *try* to reach a supervisor.
Since I couldn't get to a supervisor on the phone, I decided to try to email - but couldn't find an email address for customer support to save my life.
I absolutely cannot believe the level of idiocy and obstructionism I encountered. Nadine, Andre', and Dan - you all need to learn to speak English and understand questions and how to obey instructions and requests.
I am now stuck with having to sit by my computer for the next 24 hours until they make my new domains live just so that I can change the registration to private - or move the domains.
Why does it take 24 hours to make them live anyways?
This is insane.
Before all this happened, I'd been thinking about setting up my actual hosting here, but now, no way in hell. I am actually going to transfer all of my domains elsewhere. If customer service is this bad just to register domains, I can't eve imagine what it would be like to deal with if I have problems with actually setting up the sites.
BTW, the email address box above wouldn't accept my full address. It's a .com address, not .co.
1&1 has been a love hate relationship, that is ending badly. Several times over the last several years they have arbitrarily decided to make a change to our account to looses thousands of dollars in business.
- On several occasions they turned off our email.
- One time about 100 of the 300 domains we had with them stopped pointing where they were suppose to...we had to correct each one.
- The last straw was last night they deleted about 80 of our external domains, the email addresses that went with them and of course any emails saved on their server.
Their "support" is a joke. A ten minute conversation about how to spell our domain name, followed by "them looking into it." I hate calling a place when I know more about their system than the person representing the company.
I use to recommend 1&1 to anyone looking for cheap hosting. I justified their incompetence with the fact that their rates are pretty cheap. However, they would need to pay me to deal with this crap, so no their pricing isn't even any good.
In conclusion if you want a web host who randomly decides to delete your stuff and then is too ignorant to help fix things choose 1&1.
Horrible experience trying to resolve a copyright dispute. Another 1 And 1 customer lifted some of our content verbaim, images and all, and it took 8 months for them to process the takedown notice. The customer service was virtually nonexistent and no one would talk to us on the phone about the issue. How in the world does this company stay in business?!?!
The only reason I'm still with 1and1 is because of laziness. I've been told it's difficult to transfer my site to a new host and the longest my site has been down is 4 hours so I kept putting off the move. Now my site has been down for 17 hours and counting. You can't talk to tech support, only out sourced people reading canned responses. I am so done with these idiots. Moving to InMotion as soon as my site is running again.
I have never done business with anyone like these people! they shouldn't be in business. they have no clue what they are doing, none of them. I made a mistake and transferred 3 of my Domains there which they are now holding hostage. They billed me $24.00, I pad them $25.00 through paypal and then they sent the Payment back to me. Then without notice I get a Collection notice in the mail from NCO their Collection agency.
Everytime I tried to pay them it would not go through and they would send me the scripted letter saying it didn't go through. I must have sent them 50 emails to get this straighten out and no help what so ever. It seems they do this on purpose??? So now they have 3 of my Domains locked and holding hostage until I pay their collection agency, which I will NEVER do. They obviously have some kind of Domain scam going, not sure what but they should be closed down. I will be getting a lawyer and going after them. If a bunch of us did it together maybe we could close them down or get them suspended.
Their hosting service is average, but their customer service is the worst I have ever seen. I canceled my account with them and yet, they still feel the need to charge me for services I neither want nor received.
They will automatically sign you up for a 1 year contract – they did this to me after I spoke with a CS agent while I was signing up and specifically said I wanted a month-to-month plan.
On top of it all, their customer service agents AND MANAGERS are rude beyond belief. The manager I spoke with was Damien Christopher, who apparently is a 20-something year old kid with a serious attitude problem. It amazes me that this company promoted someone that immature and disrespectful to a managerial role.
Trust me – there are more important things in life, and there are better host providers out there. It’s just not worth it – move on and find another host. You’ll be better off.
Customer service is poor. No notice of renewal sent before the actual renewal date--just an invoice after the fact. Charged me for a domain I had already cancelled. No way to make renewals manual. Overall, a poor experience. Do not use.
I've read A LOT of reviews lately about A LOT of web hosts. And the one thing I keep seeing is "1and1 is crap!" Well, I'm going to give you the lowdown on my experience with them.
I've been a customer of 1&1 for about 5 years now. I started with a free Business Class promo they ran and just stayed with them. I transferred my original domain name to them from GoDaddy because 1&1 had cheaper prices at the time. Now the two are about the same, I believe.
PRICING
They've raised their pricing a tad, and even raised current customers above the advertised rate. I'm a bit ticked at this, but I can see the reason. They do oversell, and I'm fine with that. It works, logically. After all, I'm on a "250GB" plan, but am only using ~30GB. If it weren't for some of the other features, I'd drop to a cheaper plan. Their billing cycle is quarterly for their hosting, which isn't too bad. And they charge annually for registered domains. If it wasn't for their raised price of the plan I'm on, I wouldn't be looking elsewhere.
TECH SUPPORT/CUSTOMER SERVICE
Granted, their tech support isn't top-notch, and they take some time to get back to you. My average with their tech support email is 12-24 hours. HOWEVER, they prefer that you call in rather than email, and their customer service phone support is decent. The last person I spoke with knew what she was doing and knew how to get things done. I even received an email from her with the answers to what we discussed so I wouldn't have to call back.
RELIABILITY
I've only seen their servers go down twice for upgrades, and it was only for a very short time. Their mail servers are another story. They seem to get overloaded on a monthly basis (and I don't have exorbitant amounts of email). Granted, it's not for very long (minutes, sometimes), and it doesn't exactly cause me headaches. I just get a Gmail notification when it can't contact the mail server and it's usually fixed by the time I retry.
SPEED
Server speed is GREAT! Their FTP transfer is also really good. I've NEVER had any problems with their speed or transfer rate.
CONTROL PANEL
Their CP is easy and straight-forward. It may not be the legendary cPanel that a lot of the newer hosts are using, but it lets you get a lot done when you need to, including a web-based file browser (which allows me to access my files from work).
FEATURES
Well, let's just say they don't have everything that many of the cPanel-based webhosts have. And trying to get an upgrade to PHP or MySQL to the latest version usually ends in a "we can't do that until we test it" response; and then it doesn't happen for another year. 1&1 doesn't support Ruby (on Rails) that I know of.
All in all, 1&1 is a long-standing, reliable host. They may not be the best on the market (I have yet to find out who is) but they're definitely not the worst, either (contrary to many comments). If you're starting out and want to play around with some web space, find a free host or choose these guys. I can't comment on VPS or dedicated server hosting, so I won't even try. All I can say is that I've been with them for, like I said, about 5 years and have had an extremely small number of problems with them. And if it weren't for the change of $9.99/mo to $11.99/mo, I'd be sticking with them for another 5 years.
If anyone has any questions or wants my opinion on something on a 1&1 shared *nix plan, I'd be more than happy to answer emails.
After being with them with 3 months, from the start it's ok. But after getting their WebBuiler Plus, it was nothing but a glitchy WebBuilder... and their "Basic" CGI's? WORST CGI Interface EVER
Had to cancel the WebBuilder Plus, it took me a month to get a "pro-rated" refund in Customer Service, they didn't even knew that I cancaled my product and they tranfered me to dozens of their agents to consult me if it's canceled or not, but after the moment it was all fine and I could pay at such a low price instead a overpriced package/products.
I'd recommend this because of their hosting, but Customer Service can be a bit more better 1and1...
The customer support is absolutely unaware of their own products, all the advice is read from manuals, they literally don't have a clue about what they are doing. Stay away!
I chose them for the newsletter option and it was a total disaster. If you will need that in your business, stay away!!
We regularly get conection timed out when conecting to the pop server. For the third time that I can remeber over the past year today 7/20/10 the site www.1and1.com has been down for 2 hours now. This means i cant do any administration at all.
PLEASE DO NOT USE 1&1
They advertise in Inc and other publications and their pricing looks good, but you will come to regret doing business with them as I have. At first it lokoed great and worked fine. We had some technical problem with virus wanrings from parts of our website, but the real trouble began when we canceled some domains that we were not using. We were lucky to have contacted them, because renewal and cancellation must occr two weeks before the billing cycle. They said everything was arranged and we followed up with a fax (a requirement), but they processed the fax 7 days later and billed us the domain annual fees (claiming they would be canceld in 2011. While in dispute they locked our website and control access. Each representative makes you start from scratch when they have every call and fax on the computer in front of them.
Note you must try to resolve your issue with billing before you write to compaints. Billing will talk with you on the phone and complaints only workd via email. Complaints is considered escalltion by billing, so you should exhaust billing first and then go to complaints. If complaints rules against you then billing will not help you
The company used to be good years ago. Now they have tremendous red tape, they are slow and ineffective. They also keep increasing prices slowly, when the competition lowers theirs.
I can recommend 1and1 faithfully, I first registered a couple of domains years ago. I pointed 2 at Hardhathosting no problem at all. I then registered a few more.
This year in January I took the plunge & took out a VPS package for £14.50 p/m. I can do virtually anything there and host my own domains (up to 30)
Any problems and I can contact server support via phone,email, or their support contact. These server people really know their stuff.
I don't usually do reviews, I came here looking for something else & felt I should reply.
Terrible in every way. I tried to cancel my 30 dollar Website Builder thing but they decided to say I don't have it. Okay, that's what I wanted, forgive and forget. They turn around a few weeks later and charge me for another three months. Not to mention how hard it is to edit websites, whatever I want to use is always down, and when I publish, it changes from the way I edited it. NEVER USE 1AND1!
I just signed up with this company yesterday thru their FREE i year domain promotion. I then found this site and read all of the negative reviews and how people were getting trapped into a scam. I have been scammed before - it sucks - so in a last ditch effort to rescue my domain name from this company I went to GoDaddy.com and low and behold - the domain name was still available. I called 1 and 1 and let them know that people trust that when they sign up a domain name they expect to own it - the guy smugly said "well, we just dont have enough people to enter in the hundreds of orders we get every day"... i then let him know that I had registered my name with Godaddy who parked the site in 2 seconds and I had cancelled my paypal agreement with them. He said "That's Great!"... well, that's their customer service for you. MY POINT: Its NOT TOO LATE if you just signed up, go to another site and save your domain, and block them from charging your paypal or credit card.
Customer Support Department is pretty much non existence. I've tried to cancel my account with them for months, and there's no easy way of doing it. I try emailing them, but never got any response. Try calling them numerous times and every time I was put on hold and eventually the line get discounted. Stay away!
I highly recommend that you DO NOT use this supplier. I signed on for their free trial of their business site in January 2010. 4 days later I cancelled my trial. They have been sending me invoices ever since. I sent them copies of all of the emails I had from them confirming that I had cancelled in January and they are still chasing me for payment. Now they are trying to say that I am locked into a contract within them until January 2011. I have written to the Observer money column about them and hoping they will follow this up. They are either completely incompetent or deliberately ripping people off - either way - I would avoid.
DON'T !!!!
DON'T USE 1&1 AT ANY COSTS!
I am almost 40 years old, I'd never in my life had a such terrible experience being a client of company.
I wonder how it's possible they are still in business
My story starts when I use their 'free of charge' 3 month service, which I didn't like and cancel after couple weeks, then I receive invoice few weeks later. They charge me over 50U$.
It took me dozens of emails, hours on phone with incompetent people to at least get my money back.
I did some research on internet about 1and1 after this.
There are thousands of thousands people being very unhappy with their service. It's an ocean of anger, unhappiness and fed up folks.
Literally compalint after complaint, I've found issues like mine, smae or similar situations everywhere.
Since then I just watch them carefully.
I am not IT guy, I run small business and my knowledge about IT is little.
This is mainly reason i didn't gave up with 1and1 after first issue.
Now I am being in same story again.
I paid them for service over 100 US$ for 6 months till July 2010.
I canceled 70% of my package month ago, and those bust..@@s charge after that for another 50US!!!!
great logic, you take less - you pay more!!:)
The way they deal with you.....it's just nightmare
their explanations - pathetic and hilarious...
PLEASE DON'T USE THEM !!!
I read that warnings too late...I paid them over 300US so far, for one year
I am sure I can find reliable and please to deal with company
WARNINGS again - 1 and 1 is a worst nightmare ever!
AVOID!
I have no problems other than I had a page that could not be shown, this was due to a error in the .htaccess file, which 1and1 customer support got fixed including the correct code with in 24 hours.
I have over 120 sites hosted there, and there has never been a problem with 1and1.
The only complaint I have is that they only have 50 Databases for the business pack but 100 domains can be hosted..
I BEG YOU. PLEASE DO NOT USE 1 AND 1. There activities are criminal. For starters they do not allow you to use your own DNS very easily if at all.
Then as many others have stated they do not allow you to transfer without a fight. I tried to transfer my domain 4 times and kept getting an error message that it was locked when I know very well it wasn't.
I then canceled it in hopes that that would work. BIG MISTAKE.
My emails went down as did my website. In place of my website was a 1and1 advertising page displaying my competitors ads!!!
I called technical support and was told there was nothing they could do. After being very firm and somewhat threatening, I was told they could uncanel it but that it had to be escalated. I bascially said, "What the F*ck?" followed by "Okay" and hung up.
I than called their Billing line pretending to be a lawyer. The lady immediately directd me to (cancel.1and1.com) And lo and hehold there is the option to reverse the cancelation.
SO MAYBE MY DOMAIN WILL WORK NOW BUT 1AND1 IS STILL HOLDING MY DOMAIN FOR RANSOM. HELP!!! I need to get away from them.
DO NOT USE 1AND1. Please. CIRTEXDOMAINS.COM IS MUCH BETTER AND SAFER. They also offer much better customer service and resonable prices.
1and1 really sucks. I registered domain name with 1and1 and had no problem with it, later on I happened to read a review from a client, who said to stay away from 1and1. I didn't listen. I registered the web hosting with free domain name, and am planning to do many more (I am a web developer) and 2 days later, I did not like the feature. It did not allow me to edit my own code from there. I called and asked them I wanted to cancel it and then register only the domain name for me. The gentleman was very helpful telling me that he could downgrade the package for me, and did not explain to me anything else. The web hosting is money back guarantee. The next day I found out they only credited $5 to me. I called in and someone transferred me to talk to a billing manager. He did not try to solve the problem. 1and1 does not value their customers. I could not believe that. I cannot wait to transfer my domains to another domain, web hosting companies.
1and1, this is American, not China or Vietnam. I am not upset because I lost $12, I am upset because of the way 1and1 treated me like they are saying "We don't need you, clients!".
Good luck in doing your business!
I hate this company. The deduct from your checking account WITHOUT warning. You credit card information is kept with them permanently. You can't even log on to change it. They laugh at you when you ask them to give you a little notice before-hand. This is just one problem. DO NOT USE. They do not know what shopping cart software is and their reliablily is terrible.
1and1 is illegally holding my domain and keeping it from being transfered to a new registrar. They said "no, there is no legal reason we are keeping your domain name, it is a technical issue". 2 weeks and they still refuse to turn the privacy off.
This company 1and1 needs to be closed here in the United States for fraud and illegally holding domains owned by individuals and companies.
Has anyone started a class action suit against them? If so, I'M IN!!!
I have the entire thing in writing and proof of their lies in writing. I have never dealt with anyone so fraudulant as 1and1.
1and1 can wreck your business. You cannot rely on this company for email or web site hostig. During my several years with them, we lost our website twice and our email crashed several times. For a family web site the appealing prices would make it possibly worth it, but if you use them for business, you are possibly committing suicide. The last straw came when we tried to transfer our web domains to another provider. They claim they follow ICANN rules and they do. ICANN allows a receiving provider to "take" the domain away after five days if they current host does not release it. 1and1 will not release your domain until the last minute, if at all, requiring your new provider to take it away from them. This practice is malicious and geared to wear people out so that they do not transfer domains. Who wants to do business with a company like that?
I wish I'd read the reviews here before signing up with 1 and 1. Trouble. Big Trouble. First I tried to install one of their 'click n build' packages. It didn't work so I got onto their support team. Firstly I phoned. Not good! He couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand him... But Hey! His English was a lot better than my Filipino. So I moved to an email dialogue trying to get my problem solved. Their responses were slow and not helpful. I was patient and polite, thinking... ok, problems occur, let's just do whatever it takes to get it fixed. Then they stopped replying to my emails. Just stopped. I sent... maybe ten emails... asking what was happening. Nothing! So that's when I decided to move my hosting. That's when the nightmare really began. They just don't want to let you go. You have to read the very small print and log on to a special cancelation web-site, click all the right boxes, then click on their confirmation email. I also made the mistake of replying to their customer service survey asking if I'd been satisfied. I gave them the lowest possible rating. Whoops! Now it's open warfare. I'm still trying to get my domain name transfered. They say I have to apply again and again, but each time I do... transfer denied. Now they say they have no record of the first two transfer requests. They locked my domain on the third transfer attempt... and I KNOW I UNLOCKED IT... because they said I had to phone them to confirm my identity and ownership of the domain. DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH 1 AND 1! I have now reported them to iCANN. But I'm not hopeful... and I resent the time and trouble they've caused me.
The worst customer service in the world. BAD ATTITUDE, BAD RIPP OFF, TRICKS INTO CONTRACT, CHARGE YOUR ACCOUNT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, RENEW YOUR ACCOUNT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, MAINTAIN HOW MANY TIMES YOU CALL AND REASON IN ORDER TO DEFLECT OR DISCONNECT OUR CALLS. NO REFUND OF YOUR MONEY IF YOU CALL 1 MINUTE PASS THE DUE DATE, THEY DO NOT HONOR THEIR TERMS. DON'T CARE IF YOU HAVE BEEN WITH THEM FOR YEARS. THE HAVE THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE ON THE INTERNET. Stay away from this scammers, when you call to cancel your trial, they will persuade you into something else. NOW I'M BEING RIPPED OFF $600 DOLLARS FOR THE NEXT YEAR FOR A CONTRACT THAT I DID NOT WANT. Also misspelled and register the wrong domain for me over the phone on two occasions and I still had hope on them, but they went to far. Customer service Brian and two other women + the King of the sarcastic, bad attitude and RUDE customer service you could, a guy name BRIAN. "You are stock with this contract because you failed to cancel the trial on time (wrong, I called to canceled and was told that I could cancel after the 90 days, and just get charged for the amount that was used), i guess that's your error not ours, so if you do not pay, I guess your account will be sent to collections and your credit will be ruined". These where his exact words. After being on the phone for 1 hour and 23 minutes clocked on my phone. The phone call ended by this gentlemen hanging up on me. He did not even let me speak, because every time I tried to explain to thee guy he would speak over me. USE 1AND1 FOR HOSTING IF YOU WANT TO GET RIPPED OFF AND SPOKEN TO IN A BAD MANNER
I had four domains registered with 1and1.com for four years. My credit card expired and my email address changed. I had no further interest in the domain names. My street address was known to 1and1 but they charged my account with the cost of renewal and sold the account to NCO Financial, a collection agency instead of writing me. That collection agency has been fined many times for violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. They operate under many different aliases in different states. They have been fined by state agencies many times. If you ask them a “difficult” question they will hang up on you.
1and1 is essentially a German company (United Internet AG, predecessor: 1&1 EDV-Marketing GmbH, in Montabaur, Germany (1988)) that is trying to implement their German ways (befehl ist befehl) of doing business here in America.
If you have a subscription they will insist on your pro-active instructions to terminate that subscription as opposed to the local custom to let it expire if you are not paying for an extension. Once they sell the account to NCO they lock your domains so that it is not possible to transfer them without you having paid NCO. If you do not pay NCO they will continue to charge your account for renewals until you pay. Meanwhile NCO keeps adding interest and collection charges plus “convenience fees”, “costs” and “other charges.”
Because the amounts involved are small ($8,99 per domain) it does not pay to hire an attorney but they rake in many dollars that way. Then once they unlock your domain and you transfer it they still invoice you for another year. Your credit rating may be destroyed and you may have to pay twice for the same domain name.
The only way to take action against them is to file a class action suit. Their actions are unconscionable and unethical to state it mildly.
With the BBB they rate an F, the lowest rating!
Do research before you end up in the clutches of 1&1!
The WORST web hosting company ever; not only will they rip you off and add extra charges to your account: they will take legal action against you if you do not pay the extra charges. I took them to the crown court for harassment and violation of my statutory rights; where the failed unanimously. Also unless you take legal action you have to remain with them for a contracted period of time.
I have seen some rubbish web hosts in my time but 1&1 take the piss....
The credit card that I had on file for one of my accounts with 1and1 expired and since I didn't update or cancel the account within 28 days, they sent me two collection bills, one for the $29.97 for the web hosting service and another for $18.95 for the collections company and if you want to make the payment online through NCO, they charge you another $8, just unbelievable. When I called them up to resolve the problem they told me I had to pay the collection company and that there was nothing they could do which is pretty sad after having an account with them for several years. I must say their web hosting is good but after going through this billing issue which might have affected my credit, I'm never using any of their services ever again, there are much better and cheaper hosting companies than out there.
If it works, the price is good. But just hope you don't have a problem. Tech support answers the phone but don't a clue how to fix anything. All issues must be escalated to a higher level via email by them. You have no access to higher level support nor will anyone ever call you. No supervisors to talk with either to complain. Complaints can only be emailed. What a horrible experience. 45 days with them and have had 2 major problems with exchange email accounts. Hw can you run a business like this?
If for any reason you miss a payment (we changed banks) 1and1 will only attempt contact by email prior to sending one to a collection agency.
In spite of the extreme previlance of bogus billing, they refuse to inquire into or correct a situation by phone or mail. Their simple response is 'we are a green company'. They wouldn't even resolve this elementry issue after contacting their billing department directly.
Well I probably now have a negetive mark on my company's credit standing but they have lost multiple accounts over $18. Their CFO must be a financial wizzard with zero relationship skills.
Do not use 1 and 1! First they advertise free 3 month trial, to me that means you should be able to cancel during that period, but no you have just entered into a tear contract that can't be broken, I was just told. When I ask for a supervisor twice she refused. The reason I wanted to cancel: the business package I purchased advertises newsletters, autoresponders etc.. I have spent all day trying to get a newsletter signup/unsubscribe feature on a web page and in emails. Every time I call it's a different answer. All my info tells me I should be able to access HTML source code with an icon provided but when I try it...It says you must upgrade to WSB Plus at >$9.99 extra a month. The feature clearly should be there and the tech kept trying to convince me that it works instead of transferring me to a supervisor for a fix or refund! I'm still not sure if I'm going to be able to cancel! What do the think a customer paying a year of fees against their will will do? It even says 3 month free trial! Since I'm unable to access source code I'm sure there will be many other listed features that don't work or at least very limited. DO NOT USE 1and1! Oh, one more thing, while working in control panel I kept loosing THEIR connection, not fun to keep logging back on.I just hope they don't read this before I try hard again to cancel the TRIAL contract!
I signed up with 1and1 many years ago for a dedicated Linux server, $50 a month. A couple years ago, I decided to sign up for another server for $100/month and planned to migrate my old server to it.
However, I never did manage to move all the websites to the new one, so I have had both for a while.
The new servers have been problem free.
But for the old one, I never notice the server going down or anything. However, twice they have had to move the server. The second time they did that, they totally screwed it up. The console port given to me got connected to someone else's server, and I would assume my server got setup to other people's console port. Network was down and they took more than 24 hours to resolve the problem. There was no way to escalate. They said they knew there was problem but still took more than 24 hours to fix. All my clients' website and emails went dead for those 24+ hours.
A couple of weeks ago, they decided to move the old server to a totally different physical location. The move seems to have gone well. I finally managed to move all my clients off the old servers, and decided to make a final dump of all my files before I discontinue server. All of a sudden, two days ago, I lost network connection to my server. I was able to log in via console, but found the network setting to be quite strange (it uses dhcp). I rebooted the machine a few times, tried manually change the network setup on the fly and nothing worked. I open support call and they tried booting into rescue mode and couldn't help. So they sent me email and tell me it must be a software config problem the only way is to back up my data and re-image. Ok, how do I back up my data if the network is down? Well, I already did a backup a couple of weeks ago, so I don't mind loosing non-important stuff from the last 2 weeks. So I went ahead and started a reimage. The reimage didn't work at all. From the console I can see it booted via PXE but went into a Debian test kernel. I saw the machine rebooting by itself many times. Sent a couple more emails and never heard back after more than 6 hours.
I am looking for another company now. There is no way I can stay with them. Or I will have to get an additional server and back up my active client sites as VM. I can't image what I am going to do it they screw up my other server. Their support absolutely sucks.
I used them a few years ago and they were great I had no problems at all. I went back to them again and still no problems. I don't see why people are complaining. They are a great host and I never had any problems canceling or renewing any package and/or domain I had from them.
Customer support does not meet my expectations in any way. There is no urgency and poor escalation procedures.
This week, I inadvertently messed up 1 single file on the server and my local server. I requested a simple RESTORE. I explained that I was 'down' as a result of my error. The support person told me they would escalate the issue. It has been 3 days and 5 phone calls later. Call center is in the Philippians. Admins are in the USA.
Best lines...
1) What's the difference between a backup and a restore.
2) "we don't have the ability to call center... we only have e-mail to send request".
3) You are not the only customer with escalated issues.
They should be out of business, the billing practices are horrible, they do not listen to customers. This company will send to collections without even your knowledge and then charge a ton to restore your service, bait and switch, STAY AWAY!!
I hosted a personal website on 1and1 for a while. It worked okay, but, when I decided to let it expire, I learned why they have such a bad reputation. They default to an auto-renewal of your account, which they never tell you about. The result is, if you are not reading all of your junkmail from 1and1 (WHICH YOU WILL GET TONS OF), you won't notice the one email they slip in telling you of the re-up. If your card has not expired, you will get charged. If your card has expired, as mine did, they send you to collection without further notice. I've never had a bill go to collections, but now I have with them. For a (&*^^* $20 bill! AVOID THESE SCAMSTERS LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
We use 1and1 for our company email. I would say that our emails work properly about 40% of the time. I am certain that we would be more efficient as a company if our emails weren't constantly causing us grief. Sometimes, we can't login to our emails at all. Sometimes it kicks us off in the middle of emails. On a lighter, but annoying note, our email signatures are listed at the bottom of the page instead of under the email. In other words, if there is a thread of emails, you have to scroll down to the very bottom of the thread to see the signature. I have learned to cut it and paste it under my email each time I send one. Quite annoying. I am usually not one to complain about something like this, but I regret my choice of 1and1 and wouldn't recommend them if my life depended on it. I can't wait until my contract with them is up so that I can move on.
Registered a domain. Canceled before renewal but the cancellation did not go through properly. I contacted billing and was told charge would be forgiven IF i sent my account info through the mail. I replied to let them know I was uncomfortable sending account info through the mail. the final reply/correspondence I received from them was telling me the package was canceled. So what else would I assume that they held to their word and forgave the registration fee? Instead. 3 months later I get a 27$ bill from a debt collector agency. I call billing and am told that I should have given my account info, as it's safe to send passwords through the email (uh what?). The guy who told me this was the same person who emailed me to say the package was cancelled (as opposed to saying 'We won't forgive the charge unless you give us your account info'). Then I told to email complaints. The guy that replied was the same guy from billing who told me that the charge would be forgiven.
Awful service. Use Godaddy, Netfirms, or Name Cheap are far superior registrars. I wish I had checked out reviews sites first. They will take your money and leave you high and dry. DO NOT USE THEIR SERVICES.
DO NOT USE 1and1 if you are ordering a domain from them, they will AUTOMATICALLY RENEW your plan without your authorization. Even if you cancel one day after the receipt of their invoice, they will NOT give you a refund. They'll only cut & paste from the terms and conditions like robots. Actually, they WON'T refund your money unless you cancel before the subscription period ends. Beware with this company.
Their cancellation of auto-renewals is a trap where their support and billing are more than happy to lure you in. Then, your domain is set to a "soft expire" state. Actually they freeze it for any use and demand money for the reversal.
They also tried charging me with the more than 10 times of the displayed invoice amount refusing any explaining. They failed only because (after the auto-renewals experience) I was lucky to cancel their payment agreement from inside of PayPal just in time! Never use direct credit card payments with them! They are crooks and "dedicated" thieves, meaning thieves without any shame, scams who are pretty aware of their wrongdoings. With the lowest possible "F"-ed rating of the Better Business Bureau they have nothing to lose.
1and1 has the worst customer service and cancellation policy. They trick you into downgrading your package when you call to cancel and then act rude and obnoxious on the phone when you try to actually cancel. If you want nothing but trouble for a price that ends up not being so cheap after all after they continuously bill you and add all sorts of fees to your account, then please by all means sign up with them.
This the a company you should avoid, as at any time, if you have technical questions that you disagree with their answer, they will shut down your service WITHOUT letting you know!
How can you put business in such a company? Do not ever use 1and1.com or you are prepared to suffer business loss.
Has long standing intermittent reliability issues.
works great for months then can be down for up to 1 1/2 weeks. This happens about once a year. customer service and support are basically non existent.
That said the price and features you get are fantastic. Much better than any other host I use. The reliability and service though are the worst.
Evil, Draconian business practices, illegal billing practices. In exchange for horrible service, the unconscionable User "Agreement" requires you to waive your rights to sue, rights to join a class action lawsuit, rights to file a chargeback, and any rights whatsoever. You lose your statute of limitations rights too. THE WORST DOMAIN REGISTRAR AND WORST WEB HOST ON THE PLANET! To cancel your account, they require certified letters to be sent to both them and their lawfirm, after which they might close your account sometime after 30 days - giving them more time to OVERBILL YOU and still send your account to collections. They are being sued and investigated in several states, have an F RATING with the BBB and over 10,000 complaints filed against them with the FTC and state of Pennsylvania.
Go to their website and read their T&C and their other 7 contracts that you automatically become obligated to once you buy a $1.99 service. They are after your credit card account, and you will never get it back. Cancel your credit card account and they sic their collection agency after you. That's right - THE ONLY DOMAIN REGISTRAR ON EARTH THAT USES A COLLECTION AGENCY, and not just for past bills, but future ones as well, since cancellation is impossible and always denied when you do it.
If you want to be stuck with a 20+ step cancellation procedure when all other registrars use 1 or 2 clicks, then go with 1&1-you poor sap.
If you want to be billed every year for life for domain registrations and hosting that you canceled two years ago, pick 1&1.
If you want a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, 1&1 will do that for you too, but they will charge you for it until your credit card is maxed out and they demand another credit card.
They will send you to a collection agency, even if you've canceled.
The problem is their autorenew system. It is very confusing and doesn't work. You have to log out of your regular account, log into a sub-domain, mark the domains to cancel auto renew and pick one of the ambiguous options for the domains. You have to then wait for an email (that in my case didn't come) and click to complete cancellation.
When I asked the rep why my domains weren't canceled, he said an email was sent. I told him there were no emails. He said sometimes it doesn't come. I had no idea.
Now they want money even though I canceled the account.
1and1 is treacherous. They are bad. Do not use! You are warned.
I too was screwed by 1and1. It turns out I was unable to access their website using my Safari browser. My credit card was stolen, screwing up my auto-renew, and they sent my account to collections. It is now on my credit report. I originally ordered a full site, but only parked this particular site. Telephone records of my asking to downgrade teh site were not logged. They kept billing me at a high rate. I've been screwed more ways than one. Also, I found it difficult to reach these people on the telephone. I now use hostmonster, which has it's own set of problems, but at least you can speak to someone about any issue. I will vote with my feet and move my other site off in the next month prior to it's expiration.
If you want a poke in the eye. 1and1 is the place to get it.
totally crap! a bunch of criminals. I was stuck with them and fees were outrageous. It took me 3 months for a long complaint process. they would not refund nor cancel the account. No customer service. They really live up to the buyer beware philosophy. Be careful, if you can go with someone else. I moved to godaddy.com and its great, not the best but heaven compared to 1&1.
What more is there to say? I'm another victim of their auto renewal policy when I specifically took my credit card off so they wouldn't auto renew. I told them that...so they said go to the cancel site...it was too late and a few days later NCO collection is calling me saying, 1and1, my "creditor", has sent this to collections and it's going to hit my credit report. Well it did, but NOT as a collection, as a standard account showing as a key derogatory. NOT just one, but 10, one for each package they sent to collections.
I feel so helpless and cheated. I mean those crooks stealing money is one thing, but they are RUINING my credit and my future. They are worse than a bad host, they are the worst organization I've ever dealt with. Seeing all the other posts I realize I'm not alone, but how can they so this to sooo many people without consequences?
The service of this company is a true shame. They must be embarrassed of them self. The customer support is the worst i have seen. My history with them is related to their VPS Services. I got one of their packages and after few attempts to get in touch with them about few questions i just went for the purchase. (Phone support is Quick but tech appears to have little knowledge of the options and technology they are using). I canceled my service with them,few hours after the server was set up. I realized the terrible fact that after you purchase one of the packages they offer( Must say they look awesome in terms of ram and features) the IP addresses are limited to 1 only.... This is incredible, two Gigs of RAM dedicated and Nothing... you can't use it. Lets say you want to use your service for a share hosting of a couple of site, no ssl support is possible. Then why they included an ssl certificate in the packages. The worst came when a month pass after the cancellation and i have FULL charges on my credit card statement. I have to dispute them, only like this could get my money back. 4 hours with their service, almost two month of headache. Keep away of this company. They are terrible.
I signed up for a 6-month hosting plan and domain nam with automatic billing. There was an error in the last name on the account and I tried to have it corrected by following all their instructions. Not only did they ignore this request, they never resolved the issue. It was decided not to renew and the auto billing in PayPal was canceled. 2 months before the end of the 6-months, we switched to Go-Daddy and ran into more problems with their support about transferring the domain name servers. Finally, after many discussion and 1 month later, we were able to obtain the transfer authorization from someone who actually understood English and was helpful. 5 months later we received a collection letter saying we were delinquent in renewing the service. We no longer had their service and cannot even log into their system. Their support was notified about the cancfellation many times and igored our emails. They keep writing so I am in the process of notifying the SEC, BBB, ICAN and the 3 credit bureaus. DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH 1and1. Since the old CEO left, it has been nothing but problems.
After reading all the bad comments about the customer support I dreading calling. But they have been great! I ordered a package that wouldn't meet my needs so I wanted to upgrade to the next tier while maintaining the sale price. I got someone based in American on the phone right away, they where easy to understand and very knowledgeable. They even transferred my to tech support, which I'm guessing was not in America, and he was great too.
I am very happy with 1and1
1and1 is a total looser. the customer service is a joke. only 1 out of a dozen times did i actually get someone that knew what they were doing 1time. i am trying to transfer a domain name, i gave them the correct info and they are still asking for the same stuff. the phone service is usless. they wanted a form signed by the company selling the domain and a letter on their letterhead which i supplied, then they asked for a company letterhead again. when i called, they wanted the minutes of the last board meeting for this company. what kind of crap is that. they won't let you speak to a human in that department. i guess they are scared that i will be right they are just idiots. i am looking right now for a new web host. i hope anyone who reads this will find another service to host. GUY
1and1 is a company without a conscience. Liars, cheats and thieves. Not trying to spam this site, but I posted my whole story on RippedOffConsumers.org. Close to 100 pages of proof that 1and1 is incompetent and cares nothing for their clients. In the four months i have been dealing with them, they have screwed up my account in every way possible, and turned me over to a collection agency based upon fraudulent charges to my account. Then they tried to blame me for their internal systems being broken even after I submitted dozens of emails from their own tech support department proving their failures.
Just avoid them. The few dollars a year you may save will result in way too many hours of headaches when they screw something up, which they will.
Very disappointed with their reliability. Have a dedicated, managed server package. Have had several downtime incidents, most of the time, they are long enough so that we are making the call to revive our servers. Bad kernels, requiring rollbacks, TCP/IP issues, bad Apache rollout, the list of reasons has been long. Have lost creditability with us, and we signed up 3 months ago. We seem to be doing all the management, and reliability has just been poor.
I will never do business with this company again. They charged me with a late fee when my credit card I had on file with they expired, they didn't even try to collect payment yet they said "payment was refused" on my part. Their billing department is a joke, their complaints department is even worse, in fact it is so bad they won't even give out its phone number to customers! That is no way do do business. STAY AWAY from this company!
1and1 is the WORST host ever. You can go a year and a half with no notices from 1and1 and all of sudden you may wake up with ALL your domains suspended, and ZERO FTP access to anything. Absolutely no notices will be sent prior to this notion. Even if you decided to switch hosts right there, you can’t because they'll hold your web sites' files hostage. I can’t call them to complain because their phone support only stays up until 5PM EASTERN!! wtf?!?! That’s 2PM in California! I HATE 1and1 AND THEY CAN BURN IN HELL. I lost daily revenue on the time my sites were suspended and held hostage. I WANT TO SUE.
It has already been said. 1and1 is a poor service with intentionally deceptive corporate policies, they couldn't care any less about the consumer. If you give them a credit card number you will likely need to cancel the card in order to get them to stop charging annual fees. Pass by the cheap price tag and seek value elsewhere.
Called customer service several times after faulty billing issues. Each time I was on hold for over 18 minutes. I was then greeted by an angry employee who treated me as though I were some kind of enemy instead of a valued customer. I then decided to become an ex-customer.
Uggh. This must be, by far the worst Web Host in the WORLD. Or at least in the United States. If you have a domain name or multiple domain names, they are set to "AUTO RENEW". 1AND1 does not really tell you this up front, it is in the fine print. I had a big bill and they have all these strict rules on how they process your payment. I had two invoices but only one contract number so they would not even let my spilt my two invoices into two payments. They told me either I had to pay it on the spot or they would not be able to accept payment. They would barley budge and they DID NOT tell me that my other invoice for $250 was not paid for yet. So I could NOT negotiate that invoice because they already gave me a one time courtesy on the $450 invoice to take off some domain names to help get my invoice down to a reasonable amount I could pay. On top of this, they could not try and run my credit card on the spot to see if it would even work! They DO NOT process credit card transactions over $500 on the spot do to "security purposes." So I won't even know if my credit card payment went through until Monday. Since they only process transactions on business days and it is Friday (today after 12:00EST). If this is how they want to retain customers, they are in for a treat trying to offer services to the United States market. I give this company 2 more years until they are acquired or bankrupt. With this kind of service they will not be in business much longer. Go-daddy will eat them alive. The ONLY thing 1AND1 did right for me this time, is the fact that they opened up my control panel so I can manage my domain name accounts over the weekend. Honestly I think they should not even lock the "Administration" side of the control panel until you have a grossly over due balance. I was only a couple weeks late and they did not even remind me that my bill was due by phone, mail or email. You are just supposed to know when you are up for billing or by going to the "Account" panel under billing on the 1AND1 control panel. I also hate the fact that with a 1AND1 domain account you are only allowed up to 5 sub domains TOTAL. This does not mean 5 sub domains per domain name you own but 5 sub domains per ENTIRE account. So if you own 100 sub domains you are out of luck, you better choose wisely what you want your 5 sub domains to be for your entire account of 100 domain names. They told me on the phone that they could not offer me more sub domains do to "security purposes." I responded, "Really? Due to security purposes huh?" This is a horrible policy and it is REALLY in place to make you have to upgrade to one of their other more expensive web services that offers more sub domains in a package type deal.
Also on another note I heard their customer service is horrible for their dedicated hosting services. They pretty much make their prices reasonable by cutting out any kind of support and if you have a kernal bug on your Linux server, you pretty much have to wipe out your server and start new with one of their SPECIAL disk images for a clean install. You can not just use your own software do to "security purposes." That is always their excuse "security purposes." I am so tired of hearing that. I mean really tired. 1AND1 will tell you if it's a server problem, server service, sub domain question or if you are trying to pay a bill over $500. It is most likely that their answer to you is going to be "Sorry, do to security purposes, we can not help you sir." I think I am going to transfer all my services to Go-daddy in the near future. Please ADVISE, don't go with 1and1 unless you like feeling as if your being "thrown around like used dog toy and then stomped on a few times". The 1AND1 people on the phone may try to sound helpful but they really can't do anything for their customers. They all seem to be following a "strict set of guidelines" that are written in stone, seemingly from some higher order above the glass ceiling, and there really is nothing the 1AND1 customer service people can do to help you with your web service issues and problems. It is not entirely their fault, it is the fault of bad upper management. I believe if upper management truly cared about their customers, had better vision and more fair rules about how their business model should work, maybe my experience would have been different.
So I hope everyone will do themselves a favor and take their domain, e-mail, webhosting, vps, server, ecommerce and other web businesses else where. You will save your selves a lot time, troubles, and big head aches if just take your business to another web service company.
These guys really bent me out of shape. There service is OK, but the billing really terrible. To get a billing error fixed, I have exchanged more than 7 emails and talked to 3 people and have received 4 different answers for the same question. I am moving my sites out and looking for a decent host.
I registered several domain names because 1and1 was cheap.
You get what you pay for.
Two domain names were flagged because they were close to the name of another famous Internet company. I was trying to be clever, I learned my lesson.
I called and emailed to get a refund, they never processed. Time limit passed and I was stuck paying for the sites. A year later, websites are renewed and charged again.
I called again to cancel. They make this process very, very difficult. Log into a different site with teeny tiny links ( so you can't find them to cancel).
Click a few options to cancel, then wait for an email that never came. Called ...again ..... canceled ... again !!!! Never received a refund.
ARG !!!!!
Tech support is in India, can barely hear them and the voice delay is very irritating.
If just want a place to park a unique domain and never require assistance, 1and1 maybe for you. Good luck on canceling if you every change your mind and want to opt out. Best bet is to transfer or just remove your credit card information.
Worked with a client with 1and1 as a
web developer. Was astounded by poor
quality of tech support. The gentlemen on the
phone had terrible english and little IT
knowledge. Turned to email to try to resolve
my issue, which had to do with importing RSS
feeds. Spent over a month going back and
forth with zero progress. With each message
on the same email thread a different
representative picks up your case and often
will ask you for your customer information
again and case history despite them assigning
my case an ID number. Just avoid these guys
and hopefully they'll fade away.
I have just had the worst customer service experience. I cancelled my service and was assured that all bills were settled. Then 3 months later I receive a collections notice for $5 for services and $20 in late charges. I called in to explain my situation and they would do nothing for me. They said it was my fault for not giving them an updated email address when I cancelled. They sent an email to my old address which was hosted by them and they refused to send me a bill through regular mail. I will never do business with them again and I strongly suggest that you dont either.
So, they offer SSH access, which I thought was cool so that I could get on there and run a few scripts, right? Wrong. You try to run anything and they'll shut you down. This is a site I had up for almost a year -- but you run a script, and not only will it not run (they must have some process that just kills other processes) and then they lock your whole account. No more getting to your files, nothing. Hope you have a backup (I did, thankfully).
The few times that I have tried to contact their support, they are really not very helpful.
Will not recommend to anyone and will migrate my existing domains on other accounts away. The only thing good is the price... but if that's all you are going for, there are plenty of other hosts.
If you want a good host, go with U2-Web. They are a little more expensive that some others (U2-Web currently costs $10/month) but the service I've received there over the past two years (with other accounts) has been excellent.
These guys really bent me out of shape. There service is OK, but the billing really &*^$%#. I requested they cancel my account, by e-mail, the method they use to communicate with me. They did not do so or let me know that I owed them money, they simply sent it to collection. OK, I owe them additional money, but it would be nice for them to communicate that to me rather than send it to collection. I hope the collection agency gets 90% of the money.
I feel this is not ethical and I will never do business with them again. Take your own chances!
Frequent downtimes, messy configurations, no backups, no automatic backups, no way to get to your email files to back them up yourself, when files disappear they have no backups (what if a server fails? how do they replace all files?). Poor customer support. Wait, atrocious, not poor. Stupefyingly nonexistent, I should add. Nothing more to say, really bad service. not worth it. you can even get hostgator and you'll be better off, and those guys suck. Yep, I tried them. Hope this helps someone avoid 1and1.com. If you like the price, you should know that they will try anything to charge you twice, or to charge you for services you never used. They also remove invoices if you tell them they charged you twice for something you never used in the first place. They stink. ew.
I have had a service with them for around 5 months, Business Shared Hosting.
The pricing is great, very cheap. Nothing much to say about it.
The customer support is absolutely horrendous. I talked to this "professional" and I didn't understand a word they said. It sounded very foreign, like an Asian or African accent maybe. They said they would send an email to my email address. They did, but then I did not recieve the pre-created pdf.
The reliability is fine. Why it gets a lower score is because it takes so long for things to set up. A whole day to just get a shared account running? While some companies offer a whole dedicated server up in 2 hours. Which makes 1and1 ridiculous.
Some other things I do not like. There is no feature to let others have some access to your account. You must give the real admin password and username to let them have access. And at that level they can just spend a ton of money without having to re-enter a credit card or such.
There databases do not work right. When I attempt to use dreamweaver to connect, or even the sun microsystems software it will not connect to it remotely. I have to use phpmyadmin which is really horrid for me.
The software packages are not worth 600 dollars. Because the serials that come with are not for the actual software. But a modified software. As I downloaded GoLive CS2 from the internet and used the serial it gave and it was invalid. But when I recieved the "software cds" it came it a unopenable to vista format.
I would not recommend it. Its cheap, and a fine host. But, I am sure there are much better ones elsewhere.
This "jury" page is pretty one-sided. In retrospect, I suppose that mostly dissatisfied people are drawn here to gripe - given the page title "jury".
My experience has been pretty good, but I am only using them for their registrar service. Well - I recently added email, but it's too early to make a call on that one, albeit the webmail is down today.
Many of these mega-sized outfits excel at the basics - registration, dns, etc. Some of them have a hard time with hosting. I cannot really say anything about the hosting with 1and1 (don't have an account with them), but I have discovered that the mega-outfits often provide mostly shared hosting accounts.
Anyone who has serious web hosting needs should probably choose something other that a shared hosting account. (By shared, I mean that perhaps dozens, or hundreds, of customers use the same Apache server (or whatever server), using it's "virtual server" capability.
The security details are very difficult in such a situation, and one bad apple can bring down the whole cart. If you're in need of a serious web hosting environment, you should consider dedicated or "virtual dedicated" hosting. I'm not really sure if 1and1 provides such a thing, but if they do, it might very well be a better and more viable options than shared.
A note to the page creators (of this page) You should provide a means by which the various ratings can be set to "n/a". (For people like me, who have never needed to have any customer support interaction, etc)
I've used 1&1 for a few years for a number of client websites and am quite satisfied with their service. As a web developer it is always a pain trying to find hosting. My last web host (FatCow) was bought out and the service became terrible so it was time to switch. A friend had been using 1&1 and recommended them.
I warily tried them and have slowly been switching my clients over ever since. My only complaint is that they don't have a reseller setup, but sometimes it is actually nicer to not have to worry about that!
The service is based in the Philippines and is well trained in my experience. They answer promptly and although occasionally I have to repeat myself or explain something in a different way, they try very hard to follow and seem quite knowledgeable. I'm doing advanced Drupal implementations among other things so we're not talking just brochure-ware sites.
I'd recommend 1&1. I think perhaps many people have a bias against off-shore support, but I'd recommend looking at the knowledge quality behind the accent.
They have horrible billing practise and will rip you off. Horrendous business ethincs.
They store your credit card details with out permission, they report you to NCO debt collectors for no reason and with out adequate notice.
I am surprised how they are in business and how come no one filed a law suit against them. So much for consumer protection laws !! i wonder if the law enforcement is sleeping at the switch !!
I don't think I have ever come across a consumer organisation as bad as 1and1 in my whole life. They nearly killed off my new internet venture through their poor service, and are the only company I have ever come across who do not reply to over 100 attempts to contact them through every channel. Someone hacked my 1and1 account and registered some domains through my account, which were used for phishing. Despite intervention by Nominet and the Police, 1and1 did not reply to any of my communications with them. They are a dreadful company.
Summary: An ISP that cares more about bottom line numbers than quality.
My embryonic web venture was hugely disadvantaged by the fact that one of their disk mirrors had failed. Website often unavailable (as server rebooted often) for at least a week; support was very evasive about the cause until I eventually connected with one of their support people who revealed that the mirror was rebuilding.
At least one week? to rebuild a disk mirror? Says to me that they have too many users/too much data/too much load on their servers. Their redundancy measures, in this case, just did not work.
To be fair, they refunded one month's charges, and recently my web pages have been delivered with less delay, but still....for any semi-serious project, I would recommend you avoid 1and1.
I've been with this hosting company for over 2.5 years. They were great at first, but now are just downright horrible with technical support. My business website has been down for over a week and no one in L1 Tech Support can fix it. Worse yet, they escalate cases that no one on the back end can fix...or has the time to. L1 Tech Support is in the Phillipines. They are masters of apologizing, promising, and delay. I'm still down over a simple DNS entry...and they simply don't know how to fix it! Unbelievable. AVOID!!!
My experience with 1and1 is simply that of harassment, no less. It's so hard to cancel service with them. My contact with them expired nearly one year ago, I called them to cancel before expiration, got confirmation over the phone. Then they kept billing the renewal. Disputed through email to no avail. They sent out collection agency. Didn't want the headache, I paid the collection agency. Now nearly one year later, they're trying to bill me for renewal again!. I can't help wondering what kind of jerks and bullies are running this company.
Been with them for over 6 months now, had one scheduled downtime to upgrade servers and another just yesterday where they told me my site was dead but the server was fine so they couldn't do anything.
Otherwise customer support was quick to reply via email and quick to pickup over the phone. Not very helpful or understanding of the problem, tech support seems more like customer support that they don't understand a thing technically speaking(server resources for example).
The MySQL databases are limited to 100MB per without a way to merge/expand them, that's only for dedicated. I do warez linking and haven't had any issues from them SO FAR.
On November 21st, I notified 1 and 1 of my decision to change to another service provider. I received a confirmation to change transfer domain name on November 28th. I contacted 1 and 1 on December 4th. I again contacted them on December 5th via a conference call with my new service provider and domain register. I then confirmed the domain transfer again on December 8th. My service provider had sent three requests to transfer since November 21st. I reviewed my file on-line and found that my account was finally cancelled via the billing module on December 13th.
How is it that this outfit can take so long when most other companies can have the domain transferred within 72 hours? There people are a bunch of idiots!!! I am also sick and tired of the fake English accents and American names (i.e. Shaun) sounds more like Rashmid to me. All of the Shaun's I know do not talk in broken English. I have not sat since November 21st without E-mail and my websites being up!!! I wouldn't recomment this outfit to anyone even if they were the only web-hosting company on earth. Not worth the agrevation. STAY AS FAR AWAY AS YOU CAN FROM THIS COMPANY!!!
I absolutely hate 'help desks' that insist the problem is not theirs, but yours. Welcome to 1and1.
For 7 days, 80% to 90% of the time I was unable to access any of my sites hosted with them due to 500 errors. The errors were being caused by something OUTSIDE of my account and not with my sites (which have been running fine for over a year).
It took me 3 days to convince 1and1 that there was a problem with the server. The first 3 days were dealing with 'answers' from the 'help' desk that ranged from 'Delete your cookies' (yea.. right.....) to 'Convert to PHP5' (had anyone bothered to look, they would have seen all my sites have been running as PHP5 for nearly a year)...
Finally one day they decided to forward my ticket to the 'admins'. I think 'admins' is just another name for 'black hole'. Every day my site was down, and every day I got back the same thing: 'Your ticket has been closed, there is plenty of memory/CPU/whatever'.
After 6 days, I called to cancel my service. It was then the billing department that told me to email 'complaints'. I gave them the ultimatum that I was taking my business elsewhere if they didn't fix/move me in the next 12 hours.
Wonder of wonders if I didn't get an email back (from someone who spoke English) telling me he had got this 'escalated' ticket and he had moved me to a new server.
This problem should not have taken 6 hours to resolve, let alone more than 6 DAYS.
Just cancelled my package but charged £60 for 6 months, which I won't be using as I've transferred all my domains! They are operating illegally and I'll be making sure that they feel the full force of the law they wish to ignore! DON'T BOTHER WITH 1&1!!
1and1 is horrible and there customer service sucks. First the illegally save your credit card information and try to bill you for services that you did not authorize. Their customer services sucks, as well and lastly they will send you to their collections agency NCO and ignore the fact that you have tried to resolve your issues. I am currently fighting NCO and I just fill a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and I suggest you do the same.
Doing business with 1 and 1 is like a vacation in the twilight zone, somehow they changed my email address to one unknown by me, then they could not communicate with me!!! they freeze the account and send me to a collection agency for $40 and I cannot even solve the situation because the collection agency does not have the information, I tried to pay 1 and 1 and they will not accept, this is a very strange situation. The only good thing is the pricing but pricing is only good if you receive the service. I tell the world to stay away from 1 and 1.
I sent 1and1 a support query and it wasn\'t responded to after a week, I then received an email saying my hosting had been cut because the DNS hadn\'t yet been pointed to 1and1.
I know it hadn\'t been pointed as I was testing the site on the new space before doing so!!! and received the email at the exact time I needed the space!
So, I called the 0871 number to ask about refund if I cancelled the service (because I wernt being tied to any host who didn\'t want to do things my way, the customer\'s way.
I called; Both times cut off.
1st time: called billing; tranferred me to cancellations dept. cut off en route
2nd time: called billing; tranferred me to cancellations dept, then back to billing without me saying anything. Then cut off
3rd time: called billing (took down a name = Anna); who transferred to technical department!!!!! (not cancellations!!!)
The technical chap was actually helpful - he said to cancel I needed to go online to cancel.1and1.co.uk.
I didn\'t actually expect to cancel today, but it was 1and1\'s apprach which provided me with that decision. I had experiences of 1and1 some years ago - thinking they may get better and their control panel perhaps being a good one. I won\'t do business with 1and1 again.
Our initial experience with 1and1 was good but we experienced serious problems with customer support and communications when we tried to expand our package. We called the sales dept at 1and1 to request an additional SharePoint site, received very curious service and were told we would soon receive an email. We did not receive the email that day so we called again and were told it may take up to 24 hours to set up the account and to send out the email. Following up the following day were were informed that there was no record of the request and nothing had been done.
Support was curious and professional; but unable to provide any additional information, to allow us to speak to a manager or to correct the problem. Their only suggestion were to start the process over by re-submitting the request online.
SCAM when it comes to canceling service
After sending in the written request for cancelation, they still charge you every 6 month for their services. And when you do get some one on the call, they tell you that it’s not in their hands to do a cancelation.
SCAM!!! Stay away from them. Initial setup is cheap, but than you pay through your nose!
I\'ve been a customer of 1and1 since around 2003 when they were offering their free hosting package for 3 years. Since then I honestly have nothing to gripe about with them. Their support is great as web hosting goes. But as someone who has had a website and has actually worked as an admin for some time, I could be just brushing off some things others might find annoying and don\'t consider any of the minor issues as having relevence at all.
Here\'s a set of questions you might want to ask hosting companies with regards to their services: http://www.microdevsys.com/WordPress/?p=470
All in all not a single one I called from the dozen or so, has had technical support where two support staff on two different occassions / days gave me the exact same answer. The answers I got were always close but never the same. From the dozens of hosting companies I called, none had this 100%. For me, that\'s expected and is the only thing I keep in mind, but it\'s also human nature.
Everything else is perfect for me. In all my time with them, I have not caught them where my site wasn\'t available. I suspect there was time for sure where probably my site was down but I haven\'t caught that yet.
By far I have to recommend 1and1. I\'m sure it\'s probably not for everyone out there but considering what I\'ve seen in this industry, I\'m not surprised at all why they are the #1 host.
I\'m through with them....several times a year it goes down for literally days with no response or assistance forthcoming from 1and1....their support is horrible.
I have so many issues with their webmail yet they always give me the most bizarre instructions to try to assist when I call them.
As of this moment...my domain (www.dechiane.com) has been down about 3 days.
Worst experience ever. Billing practices unbelievable.Customer Service severly lacking. Google 1and1 and llok at the massive number of complaints then go elsewhere. If your experience was like mine contact the BBB, Federal Trade Commision, and the parent company -United Internet in Germany and complain about the way the company is being run by the current CEO-Oliver Mauss.
I have been a customer for over 5 years and I am now fed up with their tech support, billign support, termas and conditions and theor overal customer service attitude.
I am a consultant that has placed at least 15 clients on this service and like to try out their new products to see if I can recommend them to my clients.
THE PROBLEM - do not ever ask them for a credit or to change anything!
I tried their MAilXchange - by adding it to my already substantial package - I found it quite unusable for my clients and cancelled it before - what I thought was a 90 money back guatarntee period.. But now I am told that this is only for NEW clients.. Not for services you can add on.... and now I am stuck with something I tested for a week and I have to pay for it for a year!
I called and eventually got to speak to a \"r\" Damian in the US billign office who stonewalled me and basically told me that it was tough and that I am stuck paying and he did nto care if I took my business and my clients business elsewhere...
They send our surveys and never take note or respond to customer comments or negative answers...
My recommendation - DO NOT USE 1and1 - They hate custoemrs and will do not like talking to people.. note that there is no way to get hold of any manager or senior executive.
Sure it is going to take some work and some time to move from 1and1.. but I will do it and they will lose thousands of $ of my business every year..
I\'ve recommended all my website customers to 1and1.com, and NONE of them have ever complained! Not once!! (about 48 customers so far).
I also use their domain and hosting service with ZERO complaints.
Their support team answers the phone within 1 to 3 minutes and
has always assisted in a consistent manner.
(Yahoo Internet Support will put you on hold for 30 to 45 minutes
ever single time...it\'s simply insanity to waste that much time.)
My site has NEVER been
down. They has an easy to use interface for the FTP connection and
also setting up email. Lowest prices in the nation too!!
I don\'t even know where to start:
- first, in order to cancel ANYTHING you have to fax.
- if you log into their cancel.1and1.com it cancels everything.
- If you\'ve been overcharged for something, GOOD F****ing luck getting refund.
- They will NOT notify or let you know that your account past due. My credit card expired, and bam! my account is in collections.
- This happened TWICE.
- Now they suspended my accounts in 2007 (december) it\'s 2008 October. I called in to transfer a domain only to notice all my packages has been deleted! WTF? I called, apparently, i didn\'t pay for some \'free\' hosting fee that i didn\'t properly cancel. She can\'t even tell me what it was because \'they wiped everything clean\'.
- So now my account is in Collections. I haven\'t received A SINGLE call from neither collection nor 1an1. Not even a letter.
- Now my business name is threatened to be released into public domain unless i pay \'redemption fees and file redemption form\' to retain my domain! MY DOMAIN I PAID FOR!
Thanks 1and1 for making my life complicated.
Anyone tried Better Business Bureau?
I would like to get enough complaints together to shut that company down. People shouldn\'t be getting screwed by shady business.
On top of that, they outsource everything, as they are not even real company with real assets.
This company has the worst support of any hosting company I\'ve dealt with since 1997. I\'ve been trying to get several issues resolved for over 3 weeks, and it\'s still not resolved. Yes the price is cheap, but you\'ll pay dearly if you need support. I do not recommend this hosting company, and would pay 5x more for good technical support (English speaking would be a PLUS). Actually, I would prefer that the servers work properly, then I would not require support at all.{lunarpages}
WARNING:
Do not sign up with 1&1 unless you are looking for troubles.
The hosting package is average as well as the price, so no particular issues here, but the support is miserable.
The lines are mostly noisy, you may end up talking with someone in asia that is walking down the street chatting with friends (really!) and that\'s if you can get hold of someone.
In my case I have a dedicated server that is down for over a week without apparent reason. The few times I was luky enough to reach a person and understand eachother, they could not tell what was wrong.
So here is again my warning:
Do not signup with 1&1 unless you are looking t=for troubles!
Well I see that I am not the only one that feels they are useless and incapable of giving any real support. Only been with them a few months and it has been continuous battling with web site slowing down unable to connect to database and then all I can get from them is when they tried it was up. For F-sake the fringing fault is intermittent what part of this don’t they understand? I have reached the stage I don’t even have to read the replies to my tickets as they are all the same copied and pasted off a whole lot I would expect. If the problem reported is A use b1 reply I can just see it. So now the battle comes to cancel my account by the looks of it
I\'m surprised at the low marks 1and1 receives, but it sounds like most were billing issues, with an occasional real problem. Also, I think a lot of people on here are just cheap shared hosting accounts, and sorry folks, but you get what you pay for no matter which host you use. Think about it, if you\'re guaranteed \"x\" number of GBs or storage and \"x\" GB\'s of transfer, none of the hosts would stay in business, ever! Good hosting costs money, get over it.
With that in mind we have 2 services at 1&1. Dedicated hosting, and Exchange hosting. So far, the weakest part of the chain is the support staff. The servers have had great uptime and reliable service, the exchange is a little slow (slight delay in sending), but other than that, it\'s been good.
I don\'t care if you\'re at Go Daddy, 1and1, dreamhost, blue host, if you\'re not running a dedicated box, you\'re going to run into trouble from time to time because loading 400-500 domains on a box will simply lend itself to issues. Stop complaining, pay your bills, and step up to something other than shared hosting...otherwise, you\'ll always be disappointed because you want the world, but you don\'t want to pay for it...life doesn\'t work that way, and neither does shared hosting on any cheap \"bargain basement\" hosting platform.
I've actually had a pretty good experience with 1and1. I have 5 packages with over 30 domains and have had very little trouble with them. I will say, their support is a pile of.. well, you know. However, their pricing is excellent, packages excellent, and I've never been down... except....
When I first started using 1and1, I was down every few days, and at one point, 4 days. Completely unacceptable. I solved this problem by sending an e-mail to customer support explaining that they should expect a lawsuit for false advertising if the downtime continues (they guarantee 99.99% uptime per yer). Finally, someone smart switched my data to another server, and I've never had a problem since. None what-so-ever. If anyone else has a similar problem, I hope my solution works for you as well.
Their affiliate program actually does pay - I've earned just a small amount with it.
Something I learned a few years back - keep your domains with a different company than your host. That way if your host goes down, or there's a problem with billing, you can always switch the domain to a different host with ease.
Keep in mind, 1and1 has over 7.5 million customers, and most of the time, the only people that write a review are the ones who have had a bad experience. So really, even if 100,000 customers are unhappy, that's just 0.013% of their customers, haha. No, definitely not right, but just giving you an idea.
BTW, I do not work for 1and1, nor do I know anyone that does. I own and operate an IT consulting business in Tulsa, OK, USA.
Absolutely horrible hosting company. Downtime for my business package is every other week, and its usually down all day for them to fix it.
I am leaving this month to another hosting and I completely hate this company.
