1and1 Review – A Hosting Nightmare
As I was first getting into the industry, like every other newbie out there I was excited to get a hosting plan. I was first introduced to 1and1.com from a school mate, and l later saw many full page ads in magazines. They seemed like a big trust worthy company but boy was I in for a surprise.
1and1.com – Downtime Kings
“99.9% Uptime
No matter what the cause, network downtime hurts your credibility, your sales, and your business. 1&1 uses its experience and expertise in hosting to deliver 99.9% uptime, so your website is there when you need it.”
This is taken from their “About Us” page, promoting their 99.9% uptime policy, this is obviously false.
I’m usually not one to put other companies down, but their continuous down time and horrible customer service has lead me to this frustrating post. I had been a loyal customer to 1and1.com (Using the Business Package) for about 3 years now, and this will be my last month hosting with them.
Horrible Customer Service and Support
The pathetic part is, I now have 1and1.com’s customer support phone number on my speed dial since my sites go down so often. It seems I am talking to one of their customer service reps every other week regarding a downtime issue with my hosting. They promise and reassure me on a follow up regarding the issue, but of course, no emails, no calls, no response. I’m not talking about a few hours of downtime (I completely understand, all hosting companies out there do have some downtime, no one is perfect) but we are talking about 2-3 days of downtime with no support.
As a frustrated customer, I have asked to speak with their manager or supervisor regarding the matter, but again, they claim they do not have a supervisor and they can only refer me to an email address complaints@1and1.com. Even when I email the complaints department, they take about a day or two to respond and again, they do not have a solution for my issue, and continue to blow me off.
1and1 Hosting Overview
- Customer Service – 1
- Pricing – 4
- Server Uptime -1
- Overall Rating – 2
Conclusion
I will be moving on and partnering with my friend to go in on a dedicated server at this point, but the purpose of my post is to truly discourage anyone out there that is considering to host with 1and1.com.
Something I learned the hard way is when it comes to things like hosting, do your research and read real life customer reviews and reports before making your decision. Saving money is great, but the loss of traffic, losing customers, angry clients, and most of all, time wasted is much more damaging and frustrating in the long run.
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+ Add Comment30 Peeps Have Spoken Their Minds...
I agree, I left 1and1.com long time ago due to similar incidents. They are awful! Worst hosting ever…
Thanks , I was considering the business package with 1and1.com, this is good to know. Anyone know or can suggest a good hosting company? I keep hearing about media temple?
I only use 1&1 as a registrar for my domains. I found it quite suspicious that they had 5 page advertisement spreads in a lot of computer magazines. Even saw them in none technology related magazines, such as Maxim. It’s a good thing I decided not to host with them.
Yup. On top of that I just got this email from them last night.
“For domain renewals and orders as of November 3, 2008, the following
domain rates will apply: .com, .net, .us, .org, .info, .name, and .biz domains will be increased to $8.99 per year”
So, now they are increasing the price on their crappy services… double ouch.
LOL another 1and1 victim. I learned my lesson the hard way too. Your not alone on the hosting nightmare. 1and1 is THE worst hosting company out there. I have visited many hosting reviews websites and 1and1 always has bad reviews. Lets all learn our mistakes and stop using 1and1 please!
Ok – wish I had seen this and other complaints first. Clearly I did not do my research. A computer friend told me about 1&1 and being a newbie I just took his word for it. I say that now that I have been in a battle with them over billing. The girl I keep getting is… well NOT NICE- AMBER! Beware if you get her on the phone! I asked for a supervisor 4 times and she just ignored me and put me on hold.Well she said words also that do not need to be repeated.
For someone that does not know much about computers and is on a limited budget…. Can anyone recommend another place to go? Go Daddy seemed rather complicated. Any suggestions? I am open to any and all – I just want to get out of 1and1. Thanks
Hey Page~
I wouldn’t be able to give advice on other hosting companies, but your best bet would be to do research from personal experiences from others that have used those companies.
Here is a site that I have been using http://www.webhostingtalk.com/, a lot of honest opinions and reviews are being dropped on there. I would check that out and make your decision from there~
Good luck!
We had our domain name registered with 1and1. We transferred our domain over to APLUS.NET. 1and1 SPITEFULLY turned our next year’s fee over to a collection agency to harass us and put a bad mark on our good credit history. Do NOT trust this dishonest business.
Try APLUS.NET for domain name registration, never had a problem with them
I’ve read these same kinds of things about 1and1 elsewhere and had a nightmare experience with a client’s web site who had already signed up with them. As for other companies, I’m not a hosting guru, but I’ve had only good experiences with the 2 companies I work with now: Hostgator (used as a reseller plan for a bunch of WP sites) and MidPhase, which has the better customer service between the two. Now, what I’m hearing all over the net is that Wired Tree has some awesome hosting too if you need something a bit bigger.
I also went with some really bad hosting providers with great-sounding offers (“failsafe hosting” etc) and miserable uptime, then I found cartika. Seriously if you want zero hassle try them (cartikahosting.com), I’ve still not seen any downtime in over 2 years.
So I just did a search on “1and1 downtime” and your site came up on the first page!
It seems 1and1.com has been getting terrible reviews everywhere I look. I’m also glad your readers have suggested other hosting options besides 1and1, I am new to this and need some direction. I did read about 1and1.com on a PC Mag I recently just bought, but lucky me, I did my follow up on the internet.
Thank you all for this 1and1 hosting review, I will be checking out the suggested options.
Cheers
I have been with 1and1 for a few years now, and it appears that I am one of the lucky ones. I have had little to no downtime, I have a few sites on the server. Once or twice I’ve had downtime (once due to a hack and my account was suspended) and I will agree that their tech support is terrible. I guess if I run into another problem then I might just go ahead and switch, but for now they havent been too bad to me.
I do worry now that I see a post like this :/
I didnt have any problems with 1and1 for a while until early this year. It seems when I search for 1and1 hosting reviews, most people are not satisfied and they seem to have a pretty bad rep in the industry. They are similar to microsoft I guess, spending massive amounts on ads and not much on fixing their product. 1and1 has been pretty bad with my billing and has messed me up a few times just in the past couple months, which is what lead me to this search on their hosting reviews. boo on 1and1. need new hosting :-(
I’ve used 1and1 for 5 years or so.
Here’s the deal.
Up time is great. Of course, you only notice downtime. In the 5 years I have had 2 incidents where it was down for 2 hours or more (router maintenance and server hard drive crash)
A couple of instances of sluggish behavior tied to some bad scripts.
NO PROBLEM with bandwidth. Hosting many gigabytes of user created MP3 files and video, fast, smooth, and glitch free.
HUGE AMOUNT OF FILE SPACE. 400gb with my $9 plan
Flexibility:
The $9 prof account allows you to install and compile imageMagick, C++ tools (and you can run anything that doesnt access protected ports, i.e. Jabber or Shoutcast servers)
MySQL – 100mb database size max – Not yet a problem, and I log EVERYTHING :)
Access – your scripts can execute command line utilities (useful if you dont have shell access
SIMPLIFIED (almost to the point of rudimentary idiocy ) Control Panel (even a caveman could use it)
RECOMMENDED FOR:
1. Total newbies who just want to upload some raw html and simple sites
2. Power users who really know what their doing and dont need to call anyone for help,ever
3. Cheap hosting, high bandwidth and decent mySQL speed and throughput.
4. Setting up a Webservice or similar tool, PHP GD runs damn fast, for example, and the plans all have high bandwidth.
NOT Recommended for:
2. Intermediates who think they can find answers from their host: There are none. In fact, 1and1 Support Sucks so much ass, the have a dedicated support site in California.
AVOID 1and1 for .NET sites – VERY VERY BAD, and very very restricted.
AVOID 1and1 for dedicated hosting. – you will be fucked.
AVOID 1and1 if you believe you dont have to do your own backups, or they (1and1)can restore shit.
AVOID 1and1 as a Domain Registrar – you WILL live to regret it.
HOWEVER: If you have a website FUNCTIONALITY that requires high bandwidth and a lot of space,
Example.
I have a 1and1 server that uses FTP to login to multiple sites I administer and backup the contents periodically to special folders.
That is an excellent use for 1and1, and, at less than $5/month
1and1 is basically like sex.
With sufficient ‘Birds and Bees’ knowledge (and condoms) it can be moderately painless and generally not too expensive.
I suggest you use this hosting http://tinyurl.com/hostgat
our company use this hosting company service for 5 years.
thanks.
With over 5 million hosted site, and 55,000+ web servers, 1and1 is bound to have a few issues, but seriously, what host even has 20,000 servers.
My uptime has ben very good at 1&1.
My cost and features have been very good.
Most people don’t realize that 99.9% uptime = slightly less than 9 hours outage per year. It just may not seem that why when it’s your server that is down.
Most of what Steve said is reasonable. However I appreciate 1&1′s auto renewal domain feature which keeps me from losing valuable domains. As far as backups, why trust any web host? You should always have an offline backup of your site in case of an emergencty. Support poor at 1&1, it has been just fine for me, maybe the more technical the question, the more difficult it can be to get a good answer, but I would expect this from any host.
Postive or negative, surfers should take review with a grain of salt.
Enough said.
Keepin’ it real,
Kate
this pretty much hits the target with 1and1 reviews. 1and1 has treated me so terrible I will never go back to them again. From downtime to bad mistakes on my billing, they have the worst customer service ever and their tech support is shamefully bad. I would not recommend 1and1 to anybody out there, go with media temple, I am with them now.
Down with 1and1.com! Terrible company, terrible service.
Gosh that sounds terrible. I actually had a client who used 1and1 hosting and I had to fix some problems with it. It was not a very easy thing to do. I personally have gone through FIVE different hosting services for my websites (it’s safe to say that I keep backups of everything), and ironically the one that barely caused me any problems was dreamhost. The only thing is that with really high traffic websites they throttle you down, but that can be solved by splitting the website into subdomains. At that time though, the website in question was getting around 2000 unique visitors/day and was high graphics oriented. I will stay away from 1and1!
I love all the positive comments at the bottom, 1and1.com is awesome! Who the f uses Customer Support anyway, that’s what the internet is for.
I have been with 1and1.com for almost 10 years. For the last year I have had nothing but problems. I develop many sites using Joomla. The 1and1.com servers continually give an error 500 message. As a result I have had to move my customer sites to other hosting sites. The tech support response is “It’s Joomla.” Once moved they work fine.
I finally spent 3 weeks preparing my own site to move. The domain renewal was due on the the 6th of April so I decided to wait until the 7th to shut this down (I have auto renewal). When I canceled they put the domain into redemption and shut it down. The service manager for 1and1.com acknowledged the error and said he would rectify the problem. I just got an email indicating it could take up to 5 days to resolve the problem. This has not only shut down my site, but also emails.
That’s terrible, I have used hostmysite.com for a while now, I have had no problems, and their service is excellent, I have gotten live chat support at like 3am, they have even helped me with problems that are not even theirs such as a stupid coldfusion coding error that for some reason I couldn’t see.
I NEVER HAD ANY PROBLEMS WITH 1AND1 UNTIL THIS YEAR, THE DOWN TIME IS HORRIBLE I WAS ALMOST 48 HOURS WITH NO EMAILS. My business is base on pure email marketing and I make my living just sending and answering emails, I don’t really know what happen to their good hosting service, I’m switching to a better service provider TODAY!!!! wish me luck!!!!! and GET OUT OF 1and1 while you can!!!
Yeah, I learned the hard way too – I still have some domains registered with them so haven’t left them completely, but I have all my sites hosted elsewhere now – no mySQL databases in their beginner or home packages, then just 2 in their business package? I mean, come on…
We don’t recommend Cartikahosting.com because their servers are always having problems and the company tries to always charge us more by telling us we are violating their TOS and thereby demanding we upgrade or they will suspend our account. It is basically holding our web hosting hostage for higher pay.
I had a lot of problems with US based hosts. Basically, I hosts sites for a few clients and if the server went down I had to call the US from the UK or wait up to a few days for an email response.
I decided to switch to 1&1 because they had UK based support and to be honest, I’ve been impressed with them. The only thing I can think of is that it’s just their shared hosting that is pants as I have a VPS.
Now, don’t get me started on FastHosts, they’re useless!
I made the mistake of buying and hosting my Domains with 1&1. Tried to transfer my domains but they locked them up on me. It was a costly mistake, I was new but learned a good lesson. Please, if you are considering 1&1 for hosting or anything else don’t even think about it because you will regret it. I now use Moniker or GoDaddy to buy the domains and Hostgator.com for hosting and very happy with their services. I used to wake up every night with nightmares because of 1&1. Now its sweet dreams baby. Get the hell away from 1&1, they will ruin your life.
Happy Hosting!
Heard a lot of horror stories about 1and1.com. A lot about their billing practice. So finally we found one company that was even worse than 1and1.com which is cartikahosting.com. Cartika is even worse about billing as they will try to cheat you by claiming you are abusing their TOS then making you upgrade or they will suspend your account.
This is a review for Cartikahosting.com. After trying out their services, here is our reviews, ratings, compliments and complaints.
Overall Cartikahosting.com does not live up to our standards of what we consider valuable, long term services and quality servers. Their servers are known to have many problems in the past. We believe they will fix these issue however a more serious problem is the company itself.
1. Cartikahosting long term prospects – Poor
2. Cartikahosting Billing and Pricing – Poor
3. Cartikahosting Customer Service – Average
4. Cartikahosting Server uptime – Poor – Average
5. Cartikahosting Control Panel – Very Good (Hsphere)
6. Cartikahosting Overall Rating – Poor – Average
Cartikahosting.com in comparison to other similar web hosting companies is NOT recommended.
Wow, I’m really kinda surprised to see all the negative reviews here. I currently have 4 accounts with 1and1. 3 are shared hosting packages and 1 is a dedicated server which runs a very large website.
I’ve been with 1and1 for over 5 years now and I’ve NEVER had a problem. I can think of only 1 or 2 times in the 5 years that my sites have been down and they were for very short periods of time.
Thay are one of the least expensive hosting companies I’ve seen and their billing is very lenient.
And I’ve contacted their support several times and gotten response very quickly.
I really just can’t believe so many others have had problems with them.
Maybe they just like me?
Hi, I can only agree with everything you said. I was with 1&1 for 2 years (a newbie, seeing all the ads in magazines…, same story) and I too experienced their really horrible support and customer service. Email contact is almost not possible because you never get an answer or get it so late that it’s meaningless. Phone support tells you they are working on your problem but nothing happens. They don’t call you back, they don’t give you any advice,… And on top of it all, when I tried to leave the company after the first year they gave me an exceptionally hard time. It ended with me having to sign for another year because their deadline for terminating the contract was 3 months(!). My letter missed the deadline by 1 day(!). Definitely not recommended!
Sorry for the double posting… but I just read the post from Lee “[...] suggested other hosting options besides 1and1, I am new to this and need some direction.[...]” and also the post from Tex, saying “[...]1and1.com is awesome! Who the f uses Customer Support anyway, that’s what the internet is for.”
@Lee: I use Netstorage for my own sites and also for customers who don’t have a registered domain/webspace. It’s cheap and reliable – or at least has been for the past 3 years and I’m positive that it will be so in the future. Support has also been very good and helpful. Once a guy from the customer service guided me to a procedure step by step via the phone – it took almost 50 minutes and the guy on the line didn’t hasten, didn’t rush me at all, just polite and patient explanations… I was impressed!
@Tex: you think customer support is “sooo yesterday”? What do you do if you don’t get any response via the internet? No answers to your mails? No helpful information on their website and the support pages there? You’ll end up calling customer support at some point when everything else you tried failed. And that’s what happened during my time with 1&1 – not only to me, obviously.
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