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Review by mediahound 
Posted: 26 days ago
member for 234 days, 18 visits, last login: 8 days ago
 Richmond,Contra Costa,CA
 Contract price not specified.
 "Free private domain registration"
 "Terrible customer service and user interface"
 "Avoid at all costs"
| Pre Sales information:
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Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
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(ratings below consensus)
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I decided to give 1and1 a try for a domain name registration because I saw that they offer free private registrations. Big mistake! After my first year was up and I wanted to transfer the domain name to another registrar, it was like pulling teeth dealing with 1and1 to get them to transfer it.
One of the problems is that for their private registration, they actually register your domain name to themselves. Getting them to release it was a big huge hassle and dealing with their customer support both via email and phone was terrible. They are not friendly, do not understand their own systems and do not communicate with each other (one department kept referring me to another department who in turn said, go back to the first department for help).
I highly recommend you avoid 1and1.com
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Review by justinmason
Posted: 71 days ago
member for 71 days, 0 visits, last login: 71 days ago
Hopkinsville,Christian,KY
 Business customer
$19 per month (3 month contract)
 about 1 days
"Very user friendly interface (control panel); Alot of Options"
"World's worst technical support."
"Eh, you get what you pay for, but it works."
| Pre Sales information:
Setup experience:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
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Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Only highly negative issue I ran into was a few months after site launch I installed their In2Site Live Dialog (a live on-site customer support/chat application).
It's an option they provide on their control panel. The program works great, but unfortunately they neglected to state that it sets your default index to a parent frameset.
And this frameset has only the text "Start" with a link to your actual home page index. What this means is: Search engine spiders (or other non-framed viewers) find a blank white home page with the hyperlinked word "Start", and that's it. It did a real number on my SEO after Google indexed this home page. My search engine ranks went out the window. They don't provide a resolution to this, and tech support said they couldn't help.
I wanted to share this option for anyone else who's run into the problem before (or will enviably in the future). After a bit of reverse engineering I figured out where the frame page was, and wrote a simple ASP script that will allow you to modify this page as desired so your SEO doesn't get screwed up as mine did.
The script can be found at: »avatarart.com/In2SiteLiveDialogFix.zip
(It's a small file, so I'll just leave it there in case anyone needs it)
Here are the instructions for using it:
1. Temporarily set the root directory to read/write permissions
2. Download/Backup a copy of the “.in2site.html” file from the website root.
3. Upload this single file ASP script
4. Browse to “/In2SiteLiveDialogFix.asp” on the website
5. Type in desired text to be seen on the parent page (as indicated by the form)
6. Copy over the In2Site variable values from the backed up copy of “in2site.html” (as indicated by the form)
7. Click on Submit and wait for the confirmation message.
8. Change your root directory permission back to normal
And that's it, problem solved. I've used it on the site itself, and it works great... now just to wait for Google to re-index the site to get rid of the stupid "Start" description for the site when you do a search.
Hope this helps someone else, because it was a nightmare trying to get their tiered tech support method to do anything for me about the problem.
Thanks,
Justin Mason (Justin@AvatarArt.com)
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Review by Someguy
Posted: 115 days ago
member for 1.8 years, 803 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Charlottesville,Charlottesville City,VA
$15 per month (12 month contract)
"great service"
"they provide great service for the money"
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they rock
quick responses to technical questions
awesome site speed
they are just awesome no ifs ands or buts
i highly recommend them
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 Review by sgarrand
UPDATED: 150 days ago
member for 8.5 years, 4155 visits, last login: a few hours ago
West Brookfield,Worcester,MA
$5 per month (6 month contract)
about 3 days
"Great prices and reliability.."
"Overseas tech support frustrating but effective.."
"If you don't need support too much things run very smoothly.."
| Pre Sales information:
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***LATEST UPDATE - 5/14/08***
2.5 years later and I'm still pretty happy. I've had one or two minor problems and tech support handled them well. It can be frustrating dealing with overseas support because of thick accents but they seem to be improving in that area, at least for me. Maybe it's just luck of the draw and I've gotten lucky? Not sure exactly but I'm happy with the service I'm provided with. When they upped their packages I called because as an existing customer mine were lower. They fixed it promptly. I will never use all the space and bandwidth but it's the principle behind it. So far so good. I'll update this every so often.
***END OF LATEST UPDATE***
** Update - 11/05/06 **
I have had 1&1 now for almost a year with no downtime. My site is not business related so it's not "mission critical" or anything fancy but it works. What surprises me most is the e-mail. I check my mail whenever I'm online once a minute and I don't think I've ever gotten a bad response from their server. Better reliability than my previous host. I can't say much because it just works.
** End of Update **
I moved my site to 1&1 in early December 2005 and after the initial plan choice and setup everything has been going well. It's very important that you look over everything they offer and what you need so you choose the plan that suits you best. I chose the wrong plan at first (my error) and the support was horrendous. They were not very helpful and we could barely understand each other. I don't know what country they were from but I just wanted competent support. I do not have a political stance on off shoring, just a fondness for good support.
The bottom line is that after all the initial junk everything has been working very well. I have had my site since 2003 and these last 5 months feel just like the first two years. The major difference being the incredible amount of space I have available. I had 250 MB, I now have some ridiculous amount like 10 GB. Who are we kidding here? If I tried to use 10 GB on a shared hosting plan I'd get shut down before I got anywhere near it. With that being said, I have more than 250, which I was filling up. Great value for the money and the reliability is there.
I would highly recommend this host.
Scott
Followup comments:  
The Beer
I Love It When A Plan Comes Together
Premium
join:2001-07-24
Omaha, NE
clubs:
 ·ViaTalk
| 1&1 is good Yea I have no idea why people bash 1and1 so much.
They are based in the UK, one of Europe's largest webhosts.
Before they moved some of their stuff here everything came out of the UK.
I have over 40 sites on my $5.99/mo plan and it works great could not be happier. | |
| ric b
join:2006-03-23
Saint Louis, MO
| 1 & 1 hosting it's good to know other people like their paid svcs with 1 & 1. I've had their free svc for almsot 3 years, since they were giving away 3 year trials, and the trial run is almost up Late December). I really don't want to transfer my domain (not even sure they allow you to transfer your domain name, though I should be able to, if I want), when that time comes, so I'll most likely stick with them for a while anyway. | |
| | joetaxpayer
I'M Here Till Thursday
join:2001-09-07
Wayland, MA
 ·Comcast Formerly ..
| Re: 1 & 1 hosting said by ric b :it's good to know other people like their paid svcs with 1 & 1. I've had their free svc for almsot 3 years, since they were giving away 3 year trials, and the trial run is almost up Late December). I really don't want to transfer my domain (not even sure they allow you to transfer your domain name, though I should be able to, if I want), when that time comes, so I'll most likely stick with them for a while anyway. I'm at the end of the free hosting as well, also have a good number of domain registrations I moved to them. Of course they have to let you take the name, you own it, they are just the registar. But I plan on signing up for the paid service. The email based support has been fine for me.
JOE | |
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 Review by palmer_j_r
UPDATED: 222 days ago
member for 8.3 years, 1045 visits, last login: 30 days ago
Chicago,Cook,IL
Contract price not specified.
"Cheap"
"Cheap"
"They were once great, but all the glossy ads don't mean good service.."
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**I know longer use 1&1**
I started out with 1&1 in early 2004. Wooed by low prices to register domains, I moved tuttibuonfinearts.com and registered jpecomputing.com with them. Initial setup was okay, I think I waited about a day for the domains to come online. I initially disliked that I could not have more than 1 database. I have quite a few php/mysql applets running and wanted seperate databases to organize it all. Also you couldn't do much back then in terms of managing the database directly. I ended up using MySQL admin to accomplish that. (note - they have recently allowed more databases - 49 - for a total of 50 and for about a year or so they've been offering MySQL admin directly on their site)
I lived with it. Then about 3 months later it came time for my domain charges for another quarter. I had forgotten to change the credit card details as my expiration # changed. They did send me an invoice, and I neglected to change the details. So.. about 6 days later from receiving the invoice I get an email that says that my card was declined and that I should check my cc details to be sure they were correct. I went in, changed the expiry date and submitted. Now, in the email it stated that I had 11 days to make the changes or they would deactivate my domain. I entered the details, they put a soft hold on the card. I had plenty of funds to cover so why did they deactivate the domains?
So after some hefty hunting around, I finally found the contact #, I had indvertently called the tech support number. So I asked him to transfer me to billing. It was 9 pm, my domains were down. Billing was not available he said. Okay, can you at least turn on the domains until billing could fix the issue? No sir. In fact, my domains stayed down for 3 days. I was frustrated, ticked, you name it. But, I was locked in no way to get outa this one. Plus, one of my clients (who, I am lucky did not even notice that his domain was down) was loosing potential art buyers.. Once the problem was cleared up service ran smooth, no problems..
Then a few months later, spam started spewing in like nobodies business. I decided to go check out the control panel after mentioning to a friend of mine who also had 1&1 of all this. He said you could enable spam filters and a virus protection as well. Did that. Problem slowed down for quite awhile, until about the later half of 2005. The spam filters might as well have just been off. Luckily I was able to take the information off the subject line ie. verbage indicating the message was spam to create mail filters in outlook to just delete the junk. (as of today January 17th, 2005 - I've set up a mail forward for each of my addy's to GMAIL.. their spam blocker is much more efficient.)
Also later half of 2005 I decided to check out 1&1's Microsoft Exchange Hosting. The same friend mentioned before said Exchange can help me manage mail/address book/calendar info across many computers. Gave it a try. Was kinda bummed.. The service did what it was suppose to, but I had no easy way to transfer my two major email addresses to it. They put the MS Exchange package seperate from the rest of my domains. Apparently if you want ms exchange to handle your existing email accounts you need to pay another fee to have them transfer it over. Blah. I used it for a little while, but it wasn't worth not being able to have it handle my primary accounts. Around the middle of December I received my invoice for the next three months and so I decided that I would go ahead and use the cancellation feature to get rid of the domain. Surprise, you can't cancel immediately.. you have to choose between a month or until the contract ends. And no refunds! So with that, they then tried to bill my credit card. Well, my fault, I didn't have any funds available on the card I was using and they once again sent a letter advising me the debit was declined and that I should check my CC details. This was on January 3rd. SO, I went in and put through a card that I knew I had funds on, saw the soft hold, replied back to their email to say all was well and said okay, things are cool. My MS Exchange account was still active (until the cancellation goes through) like I said, things are cool.
On January 16th, ALL OF MY DOMAINS were LOCKED.. even the domains that were allready paid up!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was ticked to say the least.
I called up tech support, not wanting to believe it was a billing issue. And, sure enough, Paul (from India) told me billing put a note on my account to have me call them. But, guess what? Billing is not open until 9 am!!! and this was 10 pm.. NOW, 3 more of my clients were without their websites and I prayed they wouldn't all start calling me.
So, I responded again to the email from January 3rd, making sure to include my first response that the CC details were updated and professionally tore them a new one!
I advised that unless it was stated in their lengthy T&C's that a billing issue on one package automatically causes everything to be shut down, I wanted my service back up IMMEDIATELY..
Sure enough, when I woke up this morning, all my domains were back in operation, including the MS Exchange account.
In hind sight, next time I go looking for a host I will not be swayed by cheap prices. Buyer Beware I guess.
Followup comments: Turbocpe
Premium
join:2001-12-22
IA
 ·Iowa Network Servi..
| 1and1.com's email system quote:
Then a few months later, spam started spewing in like nobodies business. I decided to go check out the control panel after mentioning to a friend of mine who also had 1&1 of all this. He said you could enable spam filters and a virus protection as well. Did that. Problem slowed down for quite awhile, until about the later half of 2005. The spam filters might as well have just been off.
Been having the same experience. Turned on their "spam filtering" option. As you said, might as well not be on, as it perhaps catches *maybe* 1 email for every 10 spam email messages or so that I started to receive, and that is on the highest setting.
Their email service in general, in my case, has been quite poor in the years I've been a customer. Too bad, since that is the main issue I have with 1and1.com | |
| | beachbouy
join:2001-12-08
Nags Head, NC
| Re: 1and1.com's email system I've been using 1&1 servers since they began providing service in the U.S. I don't have much to complain about. They are a low-cost service, and as such, don't provide top-tier service. If you want top-tier service, pay for a top-tier hosting service. It's that simple. For what they cost, I feel that 1&1 does a decent job, through and through. That's not to say that I haven't had my issues with them. I've had my moments of frustration, just as you have. But, in the final analysis, you get what you pay for. With 1&1, you probably get a better deal than with most of their low-cost competitors.
~Z | |
| | | Turbocpe
Premium
join:2001-12-22
IA
·Iowa Network Servi..
edit:
January 18th, @01:39PM
| Re: 1and1.com's email system said by beachbouy :I've been using 1&1 servers since they began providing service in the U.S. I don't have much to complain about. They are a low-cost service, and as such, don't provide top-tier service. If you want top-tier service, pay for a top-tier hosting service. It's that simple. For what they cost, I feel that 1&1 does a decent job, through and through. That's not to say that I haven't had my issues with them. I've had my moments of frustration, just as you have. But, in the final analysis, you get what you pay for. With 1&1, you probably get a better deal than with most of their low-cost competitors. ~Z I'm paying for one of their premium packages, not the entry-level package, and as such, that is the level of service I expect (of course occasional issues occur from time to time and that is to be expected). It's that simple. Aside from their email issues, I had been pleased with the uptime and reliability, but email issues are kind of important. | |
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 Review by state
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 6.6 years, 3568 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Hampton,Hampton City,VA
$19 per month (3 month contract)
about 1 days
"Loads of disk space and bandwidth, screaming fast connections"
"Horrible technical support, control panel needs some improvement"
"Server good. Tech support bad. Recommend for more experienced users"
| Pre Sales information:
Setup experience:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
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(ratings match consensus)
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I've got the Developer Package ( »order.1and1.com/xml/order/HostingDev ) which is on a shared server. Server response time is very fast, loads of bandwidth and disk storage.
When I signed up they were offering 20GB of storage and 750GB of transfer, just a few days ago the offering on their website jumped to 30GB/1.5TB of transfer (as well as other things increasing). A call to tech support revealved that they would be upgrading my account as well.
Tech support has some (read: lots of) room for improvement, responses to emails take days for a response so calling them is the best solution if you have questions. I've spoken with them several times on the phone, hold times vary. Worst hold time thus far has been about twenty minutes.
I have experienced some issues that may be deal breakers for folks thinking about signing up for service with 1&1, these are not posted in their site FAQ and I didn't discover them until I was already signed up and did some google searches. They may or may not be a big deal for you...for a "shared" server it's give and take, and I think I've decided to live with them because of other package benefits.
So, here are some things I've noticed:
Control Panel: It's a bit sluggish at times and is certainly not what I would call full-featured. If you have some command-line knowledge you can configure by hand whats lacking there. Not a big deal for me, but for someone just starting out or more inexperienced it may leave you baffed.
Backups: No automated backup process. Better get familiar with tar, gzip and mysqldump if you want backups of your webspace. The more expensive (dedicated) packages include backup and at a modest fee ($40/month) you can backup the entire box to one of their backup servers.
Nameserver Bullies: If you have your own nameservers, don't get used to keeping them as the primary for your domain. I have third-party nameservers but in order to use the 1and1 service with my domain, I had to change the nameservers with my registrar. Got an email just three days ago saying they would remove my domain if action wasn't taken by Dec 4th. Once they are authoritative, you can point back to your own nameservers, but they want their name listed in your whois record...
Domain Manager: The control panel application called Domain Manager is the only way to add/delete/modify the domains associated with your account and it can take quite a bit of time for changes to take effect. Adding a subdomain will take a minimum of ten minutes to "go live", in my experience it's closer to half an hour. Deleting a subdomain will take at least three hours. This is very annoying.
Unlike the common cpanel type subdomain creations, you actually have the option to specify the target directory for domains and subdomains..they can exist *anywhere* in your directory structure and subdomain.domain.com doesn't have to live in /home/domain/www/subdomain. This is a really nice feature...took a bit of mucking around to get it just right but I like it.
Webserver Stats: No out of the box Awstats, Webalizer or Analog stats. If you install them yourself, you'll need to modify the config (if possible..I did with AWStats) or source code and recompile (as I did with Webalizer) for them to report correctly because of the custom apache log files. The built-in stats are ok, but cumbersome to navigate through if you're looking for a quick snapshot of whats happening. Once you get it configured it's smooth running. You can PM me if you'd like help with that.
IP Address: With a shared server package, there is no dedicated IP address allocated to your vhost, nor an option to purchase one (as far as I can tell). When I originally signed up and was issued an address I paniced because the address was allocated to RIPE and registered in Germany. After a phone call to suport I was informed that the address space was portable and the server was located in their NYC datacenter. Big plus, very low ping times.
So what's the bottom line? Well, if you're ok with the above points, familiar with the linux CLI and don't need tech support on a daily or weekly basis then you'll do alright....it just depends on how much you want/need to get out of your host. The big selling point for me was the disk storage, bandwidth and peppy server response time. I think I'll be happy here.
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 Review by sheik28
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 7.9 years, 3175 visits, last login: a few hours ago
New York,New York,NY
$9 per month
about 1 days
"No Downtime..Value for the money... Great Support"
"One slight one... the control panel No big deal though."
"Best Host I Have Used."
| Pre Sales information:
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I have been with 1and1 for about since December of '04. I have the Business package that offers a lot for the price. 2000MB space 50GB transfer per month 500email addy's as well as 3 domain names. I had tried GoDaddy just before this and for some strange reason they cancelled my account. In all fairness it may have been my own fault but as luck would have it, it was the same night I was looking at 1and1 and thinking it looked like a better offer. So off I went to 1and1 and have been extremely happy ever since. I have not experienced any down time and with only 1 MySQL database it suits my needs just fine.
The one bad thing is the control panel. Possibly the worst one ever but it's no big deal.
There are man other features that I have not listed. Check them out if you want.
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 Review by Jon
UPDATED: 1.1 years ago
member for 7.7 years, 3308 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
Lisle,Dupage,IL
$9 per month
"Cheap, Lots of Space & Bandwidth"
"Email Support is Slooow"
"They're good enough for what I need to do."
| Pre Sales information:
Setup experience:
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(ratings match consensus)
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Been using 1&1 for about 4 years now. Not sure why they get bashed so much. I've never had any problems with them. Other than the slow email support they're great. And if you call them, it's much faster. Currently manage 8 sites (4 of mine) on 5 separate packages and they've all been great.
I'm paying $9.99 instead of 3.99 because I wanted the business package for a site I was gonna set up that still hasn't happened. I'll get around to it some day. 
Other wise, changing or upgrading packages is easy, they have a lot of nice tools including integrated google webmaster tools which is nice.
Basically, they give me what I need at a price I'm willing to pay. So I'm happy 
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 Review by laserjobs
UPDATED: 1.2 years ago
member for 4.4 years, 2117 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Las Vegas,Clark,NV
$4 per month
about 1 days
"Reliable, inexpensive and easy to manage"
"Slow data delivery. Ftp sometimes times out"
"Works well for my requirements"
| Pre Sales information:
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(ratings above consensus)
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Works great for hosting Joomla and wordpress with a few tweeks to .htaccess
Great beginners tools to get a site up fast with
WebsiteBuilder
1&1 Blog
Photo Gallery
Basic CGIs
MySQL Administration
EasyRSS
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 Review by RideRed
Posted: 1.5 years ago
member for 3.3 years, 141 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
Huntington Beach,Orange,CA
$10 per month
about 1 days
"Dirt cheap, free domains, tons of space and traffic"
"Tech support is the worst in history"
"Good so long as you don't have a problem cause it may never get fixed"
| Pre Sales information:
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(ratings match consensus)
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Presales (3): Site was detailed about what you got and online sign up was easy.
Setup Experience (2): Setup for the most part went smooth. I added an existing domain and took advantage of their offer for a few free domains. No problems with FP extensions. The only problem I had was with their in2site web chatware. It didn't work at all and tech support is horrible. Ended up paying for 3 months of in2site that was never set up correctly.
Connection Reliability (5): Unlike my previous host cybersharks.net my site has never gone down or suffered server side exploits (resulting in site vandalism) and is always speedy. Can't ask for more than that.
Tech Support (1): The worst. They take forever to get back to you and leave you to rot on hold. They would also ignore the content of emails rather replying with general instructions that didn't at all apply to my problem. You call and call and every time you have to start over with the problem. They keep saying they'll have it fixed in an hour and never do. For me the plague was in2site web chatware. It never worked and they couldn't fix it. Additionally they wouldn't issue a credit even after admitting that it never worked right. After giving them 3 months to try and fix it I cancelled that part of the service. Oh well.
Services (3) Typical of a budget provider, plan dependant (see 1and1's site for details of services). Lots of options but some of them like in2site don't work well and if you have a problem it may not ever get fixed. The online admin is great, lots of control without having to deal with the actual dopes behind the scenes.
Value for Money (4): They get a 4 because the site doesn't go down and it's cheap. I just wished all the features I ordered worked like they were supposed to. But oh well, it's only $10 and I'm finding other uses for the excess space making it worth keeping.
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1and1
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