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…
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I started to transfer to 1&1 because I was told I could host all my sites in one package unfortunately I immediately discovered that I can not host multiple asp.net sites easily. I immediately asked the transfer to be stopped I was told to go to cancel.1and1.com. I was told to cancel the domain and this would stop the transfer. Well once I initiated the transfer I could no longer stop the transfer it was now up to 1&1 to stop it. Well 1&1 continued the transfer and then deleted the domain and released it to the public. I tried everything to recover my domain and it was unfortunately purchased by someone else. 1&1 ruined my online business and cost me thousands of dollars in sales and several hundred lost emails. I will never use 1&1 again even if they offer free lifetime services.
All hosts are like this. I’ve been with ITX for over a decade and they STILL do stupid shit. And I still get the runaround from the techs who answer the phone or chat. I guess I’m lucky in that I can call or IM the owner and he’ll give me the scoop and/or fix what’s wrong ASAP. It’s a problem all over the tech field: devs and network engineers have no contact with lowly support staff and they do things that disrupt service. Devs and Net Eng don’t care what happens on the user end. They just do whatever they need to and leave the poor CSRs to deal with angry customers. ::sigh:: I’m glad I don’t work in that field any more!