Things you need to know before even considering 1and1 as your web hosting company

For some is probably old news that 1and1 hosting isn’t the best choice around for your business hosting and it might just be worth as a fart in a windstorm. I’ve heard some even say that 1and1 hosting sucks and not to use it for anything and so on.

I have been using 1and1 since around 2001 or so and I have a couple of hosting packages with the, one so-called 1&1 Professional Linux and 1&1 Business Package which I use for static sites hosting.

I have had may hiccups along the way and tolerated them somehow, but today's experience made me realize that I need to look for a new, reliable hosting company.

One of my sites’s been running very slow throughout the day and towards the end of the day I started to get network timeout messages and internal server error 500, etc. Eventually the site became totally inaccessible. No access via FTP either.

Now, even though the affected site isn’t mission critical yet, the fact that it was down for a few hours reflects negatively on the company, not to mention that it’s bad for search engine reputation.

Major problem with 1and1 technical support:

• When calling, especially after business hours, the chances are that you get transferred to their call center in India and these guys usually are not much help, except for documenting your case, opening a trouble ticket and escalating it at best
• Naturally, they’re never able to give you any ETAs for any problems
• Oftentimes the technical support staff you interact with doesn’t seem to have much of a tech background and who don’t know what they are talking about
• A couple of times I’ve been called names other than my own while communicating with tech support and just tonight I received an email follow-up to an issue that didn’t pertain to my account. That only tells me that tech support personnel somehow mixed up my account information with other customers. Scary. Eh?

Conclusion:
Web hosting packages offered by 1and1 are surely cheap, but the quality of their technical support continues to suffer despite all of the customer satisfaction surveys that they send around after closing every trouble ticket.

You get what you pay for.