1and1 Hosting Review

October 10, 2008

Introduction

In all of my years working online, 1and1 are by far the worst web host that I have come across. 1and1 actually suck so bad, I’ve given them their own “mini-site” here on Dan Reviews. So I’ll do a very brief review here, but if you’d like to see all of my reasons for thinking so badly of them, please read my full 1&1 review.

Price

On first inspection the monthly prices look very reasonable, however 1&1 do have a minimum contract length of 6 months on their hosting packages (3 months on the developer/Pro packages), and you will be forced to pay all fee’s upfront before they activate your hosting account.

However this shouldn’t put you off too much, in today’s competitive hosting market the vast majority of hosts do have minimum contract lengths ranging from 3 to 24 months, very few hosts still use the month by month payment options, and if they do, the prices are usually higher than the 1&1 prices.

So all in all, the prices are very reasonable when compared with other hosts. But to be honest, the pricing would be the least of your worries if you decided to sign up with the devil of hosting companies, read on to find out why.

Reliability

When I was a 1and1 web hosting customer (I still get nightmares about it from time to time…), I suffered very little downtime on my Linux hosting package. Any site downtime that did occur was usually sorted out within the hour and was fixed with a simple server reboot.

Unfortunately the 1and1 internet POP3/IMAP email service wasn’t as reliable as the hosting, back at the start of 2007 I had a lot of problems receiving email to one of my 1&1 email addresses. Messages would take around 8 hours to get through the system so by the time they arrived in my email inbox, the person that sent me the email ended up waiting over 8 hours for a response. This continued for a couple of days, it hasn’t happened since but as you can imagine, it caused a lot of problems for the 2 days that it went AWOL for!

Control Panel

Now this is where things start to go downhill in my 1&1 review. Let me make a bold statement here:

THE 1AND1 CONTROL PANEL IS THE WORST HOSTING CONTROL PANEL I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS!

And that’s saying something considering I’ve also used Godaddy and Yahoo

There are loads of annoyances within the 1&1 control panel that I could review but you would probably get fed up of reading! (I mention them all in my full “1and1 suck” review)

I will though elaborate on one very important thing that I have come across with the 1&1 control panel on more than 1 occasion.

If you wish to cancel a contract, be VERY careful. The 1and1 system requires you to go to a separate website where you can manage your contracts, change or cancel any features or accounts with them. I have had numerous clients that wished to cancel their 1&1 hosting package, but they wanted to keep their domain name with 1and1 – big mistake!

On more than one occasion, the ultra-confusing 1&1 cancellation system has caused a number of my web design/consultation clients to lose domains. Instead of just cancelling the hosting package, 1and1 took it upon themselves to also get rid of the domain name. The domains, although they still had time remaining (meaning they hadn’t yet expired) suddenly had “no registrar”, this meant that for my clients to get their domains back, they needed a new registrar to take over the domain, which would have cost them £80 (about $160) – all because of 1and1′s crazy contract/cancellation system!

Also, you may get a visit from 1and1′s debt collection agency Arvato Finance….

Having transferred a domain name from 1 1and1 account to another, I was very surprised to hear that my client who I’d purchased the domain name for received a letter from a debt collection agency called Arvato Finance, demanding we paid them £9.68 for an un-paid domain name. I go into full detail about this on my blog, so head on over there if you want more information on Arvato Finances connection with 1and1 internet.

Features

If you have no previous website building knowledge and you are looking for a host that provides you with a WYSIWYG site builder, then by all means go for 1and1. However advanced users may become very disillusioned as 1and1 tend to provide more features for the novice web master, rather than helping the experienced clients.

Support

This is where things will start to get just a little bit ugly. A vital part of any hosting review is how the host handles support requests, as a customer you need requests answered in a timely and efficient manner, you would like to know details of any problems, and how these can be fixed.

If this is what you look for from a hosts support department – avoid 1&1 support!

The email and phone support is VERY limited, almost all of my support tickets were answered with a copy/paste standard reply which 9 times out of 10 would have no bearing on the original question I had asked them! If the problem required someone at 1and1 to actually do something with your account, the ticket would have to be escalated and then you would be placed in a queue before anything happened.

The support people that you deal with on a day to day basis really are the frist line of defence, they can read the “resolutions” from their screen but if you actually need any technical service, you will need to escalate your ticket to a higher level of their support department – and I use the term “support” very loosely!

Another Reason Why 1and1 Suck

As if I needed any more confirmation that 1and1 are the worst hosting company in the world, I just went into my domain management area to extend the renewal length of a domain I have with them – I wanted to register the domain for a further 2 years, rather than the standard 1 year.

To my surprise, I couldn’t find a way to do this in my 1&1 admin area, and there was nothing in the FAQ’s regarding my question so I decided to bite the bullet and contact the support team.

I received a reply in just under 12 hours, which is actually quite fast for them, but guess what? It’s not actually possible to purchase a domain name from 1and1 internet for more than a year at a time. Domains automatically renew for 1 year, every year, until canceled.

So if you are looking to secure your domain for longer than 12 months, make sure you don’t use 1and1 to register the domain!

Conclusion

I give a lot more reasons for my dislike of 1&1 in my full review, but for this short review. I will give you the following advice:

If you are looking for a new web host, DON’T go with 1&1 – bigger isn’t always better. Check out my other hosting reviews and you’ll be able to find a much better host.

If you are an existing 1and1 customer, please accept my condolences, and do be careful when trying to cancel any of your contracts!

My Final 1and1 Review Score:

(1 out of 5)

Your 1and1 Score: