1and1 review

Unlimited Shared hosting & Unlimited Disk Space from $5.95 - Dreamhost
Solid Managed VPS with 4 IP's from $60 - Liquid Web
Lightning Fast Dedicated Servers & 1GB RAM from $149 - Liquid Web
#1 Domain Registration with WHOIS Privacy - Just $9.95

The web hosting thread below was started by csc2ya on 2009-07-16 11:14:50:

I figured I would give my review of 1and1 who I’ve had a domain with since the end of 2003.

The only service I currently have with them is the domain. My site is hosted on a friends server.

When I first registered the domain there were no problems at all. However, since then, i’ve noticed a lot of problems.

Control panel: At the moment, I am trying to add a couple of subdomains, and remove some others. You’d think that the server would accept all the requests, and queue them so that they happen one after the other.

Nope….if the subdomain is in either ‘registration is being requested’ or ‘being deleted’, you cannot do anything else with it until it is finished. And in some cases, this can take well over 2 hours.

Also, I am currently experiencing regular timouts trying to get to different pages for my subdomain settings.

Support: Don’t get me started on support. While i’ve got no problem with indian poeple (I know a few and they are a lovely bunch),I feel that 1and1 take it to extremes.

Every time i’ve had to phone them, I feel it has always taken longer than it would have done if I had spoken to an american or british person (I myself am in the UK).

I have always been of the view that if I am phoning a UK company, I expect to speak to someone in the UK….same with the US…if I’m phoning a US company…I expect to speak to someone in the US. And before anyone mentions that they are primarily us based, I am aware of that. Someone looking for their first webhost from the UK however, may see the .co.uk on the end and assume they are a UK company.

However, I usually end up getting put through to india and speaking to someone where the language barrier is a problem, and they are invaribly working from a script rather than on their own initiative.

Speed: Regarding the speed for the domain loading and resolving, for resolving when I make changes to it….that can be very slow sometimes…However, the speed of it resolving when I haven’t made any changes recently is very good.

Billing: no problems at all apart from them being a bit quick to suspend services sometimes if payment is late (that happened with a vps I had with them….it was mostly my fault though)

Reliability: I have only had one downtime with them, which was during a reinstall of a dedicated server I had for a while during which their system seemingly got stuck. That took over 48 hours to complete the rebuild.

In closing, I would say that if you are getting your first domain, building your own site etc. and don’t expect to be changing dns constantly or anything like that, they are fine in most cases. However, if you have a serious website, and need to change things a lot, I would go with a different provider.

Join in on the original post at WHT, read more unbiased web hosting reviews or view our top web hosts.