If you are reading this post you most likely were looking for a good hosting company, or maybe you thought you found one in a company named one and one / 1and1.com / 1&1. They go by several name spellings. Well you did not find a good domain registrar or web host in 1 and 1. Far from it. You have without a doubt found the worst. Possibly the worst since the beginning of the internet.

By now you must think that I am joking and in all truth I am not. They are so bad in fact that its kind of humorous. In this post I will tell you how to find a good host and the warning sings not to ignore.

1. Do a better business BBB search for the host you are looking at. (By the way 1 and 1 hosting has the worst I have ever seen in any company. They have an F rating last time I checked with over 1100 complaints. yes you read that right eleven hundred complaints.)

2. Do a Google, and Bing search for their name along with the term review. While this is no guarantee of a bad business, you can weed out the bs posts to see if this is where you want to spend your time and money.

3. Check out hosting and internet business related forums where customers voice concerns over business practices and online reliability of the service they offer.

Now to my story about 1and1.com.

I have been with them for a little over two years using them for domain registrations. I tried the hosting thing but that went sour almost immediately as the service was just not compatible with other companies hosting programs. Managing the site with them was a chore non stop. Nothing was easy. Tech support was in another land, and their minds were on another planet. You were on your own. Nothing about the server interface was intuitive. So I bailed on them in a hurry for a virtual server elsewhere.

On the domain front. Managing your domains was an equal pain in the a**. Interface was just weird. Now comes the fun part. Billing hell.

First I kept getting bills for payments that were already made. It was like the billing department had no communication at all with the credit card processing department and vice versa. No matter what it will take many days to weeks to get it ironed out. You never speak via email with the same person, so they have no idea whats going on. Like starting over again and again. ITS GROUNDHOG DAY!!!!!!

Ok now it gets worse. I decide to bail on this never ending nightmare that is 1and1.com. They make it hard to leave by not approving transfers or making authorization codes hard to find and their favorite, not unlocking domain when it clearly says on your screen that it is unlocked. Yup you’re  trapped. More customer service ping pong. Then they do a mass renewal hit for multiple domains. Nice trick huh.

But wait it gets worse again. I turned off auto renewal on the domains that I had to make sure they would not sneak in more billing before I could get my domains away from them. They ignore all non renewal and don’t charge my card any more settings and wham. Hit you with un authorized charges over and over. More customer service ping pong and they dont see anything wrong with charging customers for renewals that the customer did not approve. They did this five times to me, and here is the worst part. When you get to the point where they no longer refund your unauthorized charges by not responding to emails anymore and do a charge back on your credit card. They hold any domains you have hostage until you sign a form saying that you have them approval to charge your card for the charges you did not approve. Yes thats right. They ask you to lie in writing so they not only get to keep the money you did not authorize them to take, but you agree to pay them an extra $20 per incident. Now is that crazy or what.

Please do yourself and your sanity a favor and stay far far away from this company. It appears that the only reason this company is still in business is from a huge advertising campaign, and that customers do not research 1 and 1 until they experience the inevitable problems.

As of this date they are still holding my domains hostage. And you guessed it I have to go file another charge back with my bank credit card for another un authorized charge that came the next day after complaining to customer service about the previous un authorized charge. ITS 1 AND 1 GROUNDHOG DAY!!!!!!

 

1 And 1 Internet, Inc.

Phone: (877) 461-2631

701 Lee Road, Suite 300, Chesterbrook, PA 19087

www.1and1.com