I love 1 and 1 web hosting, I really do. Great features, great price, all sorts of configuration options and cheap domains ($5.99 a year). They’ve got decent reports and now they’ll automatically mail me stats. Some of their web interface stuff is a little slow (it’s too fancy) but it’s got lots of options so I can live with it.
What I hate is their lack of customer communication:
They need a blog just to keep us up to date of the cool stuff they are working on.
They need a status page to let you know what problems are up.
They need their staff to know what problems they are having (it shouldn’t take 3 calls over 3 days to find out they are migrating some servers).
The need to let us know when they have problems or in advance when they plan to migrate servers.
If thousands of pages are generating 404 errors take a minute and alter to the 404 page and mention to the viewers (my readers) that it’s a temporary problem.
Even the utility companies can automate a hold message to say there are problems and they are working on it.
They have great up time and I understand that things happen, but had I known there was a major upgrade I could have:
Mentioned it on my site (probably wouldn’t have but would have had the chance)
Not spent time debugging and wondering if it was my fault
Not made 3 calls (waiting on hold each time)
Most importantly – Not be pissed about it and blogging about it.
I still can’t figure out what took them so long to fix it and I’m only really annoyed because of the lack of communication. An e-mail that apologizes for it either earlier in the process or even after they fixed it would have gone a long way with me…
FYI: To clarify, they we mostly down for about two-and-a-half days…
