1&1 Internet Inc. – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

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Summary

1&1 claim to be the world’s number 1 web host and the fastest growing web hosting company. According to their “About 1&1″ page, 1&1′s global community is 7.46 million people strong with 2,500 new customers signing up every day.

Website: Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Quick Facts

  • Number of domains: 9.82 million registered domains, and over 2.7 million websites
  • Services: Domain registration, Email hosting, Linux hosting, Microsoft hosting, VPS hosting, Managed Server hosting, Root Server hosting, Windows Server hosting, “eShop hosting,” Microsoft Sharepoint hosting
  • Location: Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, USA
  • Guarantees: 60-day money back guarantee, 99.99% uptime, no hidden charges
  • Contact information: Call 1-877-GO-1AND1 (1-877-461-2631). Or visit the contact page on their website.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Products & Services

Domain registration, Email hosting, Linux hosting, Microsoft hosting, VPS hosting, Managed Server hosting, Root Server hosting, Windows Server hosting, “eShop hosting,” Microsoft Sharepoint hosting

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

1&1 Internet’s performance, according to customer reports found all over the web, is not too impressive. Several people report long downtimes, some even up to five days!

While they do have impressive hardware and connectivity, they host SO many websites, it’s apparently taking a toll on performance.

Well, that might be the reason, or it could be something else, but a prospective customer would be better advised to look for another web host with better performance records.

Features

They do offer an impressive array of features, but then, so do most web hosts these days.

Oh wait! Actually, there are quite a few web hosts that offer MORE features than 1&1 Internet does. For example, these days, several web hosts offer unlimited domains on a single shared hosting account. But the marketing angels at 1&1 only offer from 1-5 domains on a single shared hosting account, depending on your account type.

With the exception of a couple of features, most features can be classified as either something that everyone offers, or something that no one needs. Methinks someone at 1&1 Internet Inc is just trying to bloat the feature list.

We don’t want features we don’t need. We want more value, better hosting, better performance, and better service.

Support and Customer Care

One word: Crooks!

Several people complain about 1&1 Internet Inc. continuing to charge their credit cards long after they cancel their accounts with them. Getting a refund may not be impossible, but it’s close. Be prepared to file a complaint with your credit card company AND change your credit card if you want to avoid getting rebilled.

I have also read accounts of 1&1 Internet Inc’s customer service people yelling at customers, calling them names, and hanging up on them.

In case a customer’s credit card fails to authorize for some reason, they send it to a collection agency before even contacting the customer to remedy the situation. This is very strange, considering it would be a lot cheaper and quicker for them to just inform the customer that there is a problem, and ask them to update their billing information. Not to mention the PR suicide they are committing.

Cons

  1. Horrible customer service and rude customer service people.
  2. A big portion of the customer support is outsourced to a non-English speaking country, which makes understanding them difficult.
  3. Performance is very bad, and customers frequently experience downtime, despite their 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Actual Customer Feedback

If you are thinking of purchasing from 1&1 don’t do it! – Louis Lang

Filed complaint with Better Business Bureau. They already have and Unsatisfactory rating there. – Owner ( customerservice at clean-fill-wanted(dot)com )

My site has been down for 3 days with no support from 1and1 at all. Nobody will tell me what is going on. This company should be avoided at all costs. My site was intermittently down for 2 weeks prior to that. Please Please someone start a class action lawsuit. Google 1and1 and see millions of negative messages regarding 1and1. – Steve Tarnowski

1 and 1 is horrendous in every way! After transferring a domain to them and receiving confirmation from them that the transaction was completed, they sold the name to someone else without letting us know. They continued to bill us of course, and didn’t even give the promised and advertised promotional discount. This national campaign for the site lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they have still not corrected their mistake. The Better Business Bureau and Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office are investigating them, and so is the media. As an investigative journalist myself, I have been sharing my story with the print and broadcast community and my colleagues who are realizing how poorly this company conducts business. Hundreds of emails gone unanswered, phone calls dropped with no resolution, no support at all, and ethical issues are just the tip of the 1 and 1 iceburg. Caveat emptor! – Kelly

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Verdict of This Review

Not impressive at all. Stay away from this company at all costs. In fact, if you don’t like someone, send them over to 1&1 for hosting their websites. Not recommended, if you are thinking of hosting your own sites with them.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

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Decide what you want from your website and your web host

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This one’s kinda like what Yogi Berra said:

Unless you know where you are going, you won’t get there.

Or something like that. I am really bad at paraphrasing stuff, you know, being just a crazy old Hostorian.

So where were we? Oh yeah.

Unless you know what you want, you ain’t gonna get it.

;-) Got it?

So let’s get down to determining what you want, and how to do so.

First things first.

When you go to a web host’s site, you will invariably find them all boasting of feature X, feature Y, providing X amount of thing Y, and so on.

Don’t let any of that confuse you or distract you from your main goal.

For example, 20,000 email accounts mean squat to you unless you are going to have 20,000 employees or other people with email accounts under your domain name.

Ditto for 1,000 FTP accounts.

Think you are going to need 50 databases? Think again. OK, wait, you may end up needing several more databases than you think, so the more databases they offer you, the better.

And do you want a host that gives you 15,000 MB of disk space or one that gives you just 10,000 MB?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Those who didn’t, are way too dumb anyway and they deserve what they get. But you and I are not like that, so it’s OK. Let the other fools rot in webhost hell.

Anyway.

You see, web hosting has become a commodity service these days. Everyone and his dog seem to be offering web hosting. Competition is fierce, and to stay alive, a web host today must offer all the features offered by their competitors.

And so everyone seems to be offering the same features, the same amounts of X, Y, and Z, the same of same, and some more same of same. And for dirt cheap prices too. In fact, dirt is cheaper than hosting, but only just.

Phthoo!

(That was the sound of me spitting in disgust! Sorry about the visual image I just created for you.)

What differentiates one web host from all the other billion web hosts is their level of service to you as a customer, their level of commitment to customer satisfaction. As unlikely as it sounds, there are a few web hosts that fit the bill, and I will mention them in passing a little later. There is another special web host (if you could call it that) that I can talk about without spitting in disgust, that I will talk about later. Don’t you make me get ahead of myself though!

One thing at a time.

Now that you know not to allow the web hosts to confuse you, what should you be looking for?

  • These days, every web host offers plenty of disk space and bandwidth/data transfer, so that’s not an issue any more. Whatever you are going to do with your website, it’s very likely that you will have enough web space and data transfer limits in your hosting account.
  • As far as the number of FTP accounts, email accounts, number of email auto responders, number of XYZ, forget them. No matter what you want to do with your site, and no matter which web host you choose, it’s very likely that you are going to get plenty of them for your needs.
  • As of this writing, not every web host offers unlimited add-on domains and unlimited sub domains, so do make sure the host you are going to choose does so, if you plan to expand later and start more sites.
  • If it’s going to be a techie site, you will want to know whether the scripts you need for your site will run or not. By a techie site, I mean a site that will require scripts. A site that serves dynamic content, or an e-commerce site, or a blog, or forum, or a content management system, or whatever else that needs scripts. So the first thing you need to know is what kind of scripts you require.  Is it PHP, ASP (classic), ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, CGI, or something else?
  • Once you know what scripts you require, you will want to know the operating system the web server needs to run on, for the scripts to function properly. Most scripts (except ASP and ASP.NET) run better on a Linux based server, so make sure you choose that, if you are running one of those scripts. Most web hosts offer both Windows based and Linux based hosting, and Linux hosting typically costs less, so make sure you know what you are getting, and the operating system you choose supports the scripts you need to run.
  • Depending on how big you think your site is going to be, and how involved you want to be with the system administration side of things, you will need to choose between shared hosting, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, and a few other types of hosting. For most people, shared hosting is the answer, but if you need help deciding, I will tell you the difference between these different types of hosting a little later.
  • Unless you have a very special reason for choosing a web host in your area, state, or country, forget it. It doesn’t matter. Choose someone that is good, not someone that is in the same geographical area as you. And why would you want your web host to be in your area anyway? Do you want to invite them to a party where you are the host (ha-ha!) and hope they get the joke? Ain’t gonna happen. Forget it!

There are several other things we could go on talking about, but take it from me that almost every web host offers the feature you want in one form or the other. They have to. Otherwise they just won’t survive in this competitive market.

So, to summarize, these are the things that you should actually be looking for:

  1. Do they offer unlimited domains and sub domains. This one is just a just-in-case thing, but it’s always good to have it. Just in case. And I’m sure pretty soon almost all web hosts will start offering it, just like all the other features.
  2. Ditto for the number of databases they allow you to run.
  3. What scripts you need to run your website, and does your webhost support them.
  4. What operating system you need to run your scripts smoothly, and does your webhost offer it.
  5. Do you need shared hosting, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, or other type of hosting and does your webhost offer it.

The rest either don’t matter, or are offered by almost every webhost anyway.

The first and second ones in the list is something you can see on the spot in the features list, but you may need some help with the other three items. I will deal with them in later posts.

For now, I’d be interested in your thoughts. What do you look for when trying to choose a web host?

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