1and1 was probably the worst mistake in my life. I just don’t know where to start from..
In February 2009, I got a windows VPS from them. I needed this VPS to host my personal web site but i needed windows programs running on it as well. I was fulled by the cheap price..
I bought the VPS, gave my card details, but nobody didn’t contact me. They didn’t let me know if the transaction was complete, if i have a vps or not.. Nothing for 2 days. Than I called them to ask whats going on and a very rud woman told me that I need to be identified by their customer authatication team (yeah, they even have such team). I asked the b**** “Usually how much time does it take to activate the acc?” and she answered me so rudly with so angry voice “I AM FROM THE BIILING DEPARTMENT” and hang up…
After I managed to get verified, they charged my card. The VPS on the website was shown as £20 per month. But after this I saw that it was 25 because of the VAT. Allright, I don’t mind this. After this they told me that they are gonna charge me every 3 months, so they charged me around £80 (when I was expecting to pay £20).
On the 3rd day the server crashed. I sent an email immediately to support@1and1.co.uk , in this email I said that the whole server is crashed (this physical machine, not only my VPS) and that I can’t login to their server management web system (Virtuozzo).. After more than 24 hours I receive a response “Please login to Virtuozzo and do this, this this…” !? WTF So then I called them. I phoned them, and a silly dirl put me on hold. I was on hold for 20 minutes and then I gave up. After an hour and something I called them again pissed, and then managed to get to somebody from support. I told him what the problem was, and I was told “Please, log in to Virtuozzo!”. After I managed to explain, that Virtuozzo is not working, he decides to have a look. After this he told me that no body didn’t pay attention to my email and that they left it for later, because they were bussy. So if you want more than 2 days of downtime, use 1and1.
But the problems don’t end. A month after I have starded my account, I received an invoice for £230. This was for the traffic. 1000GB of traffic are included in my plan, I have used around 200 of them and I receive an invoice saying “£1 per GB” and totally £200. This basically means another two hours on the phone with silly b****, but it was worse than I expected… I called somebody from the sales department, told them that this invoice was wrong and then the girl asked me “What is traffic?”. Then I asked her to transfer me over to someone else, and after this I got transferred over 10 different people.
Finally, I found somebody, who promised to solve the problem and cancel the invoice. He said “We will cancel it within 7 working days”. But after one week the invoice wasn’t caneled, on the next day, they tried to charge my card with the amount, but they couldn’t (I took all my money out).
So I called them on the next day. Of course, talking to somebody who doesn’t know what we are talking about, after this got transferred over to a few different women, none of which couldn’t help. One of them, just hanged up with me. So in the end, I asked to speak to some of their managers. They transferred me over to another woman, which told me “Our system is currently down, can you call us in one hour”. So this is what I got after two hours of phone calls.
I am working as a web developer and I have worked with hundreds of hosting companies but I can tell you 1and1 was the worst mistake EVER. Just when I was thinking about calling The Traiding Standards, I got a credit note with the £230 off. After this I canceled my account straight away. As somebody else said “1and1 is suffer!”.
I will never ever use 1and1 again!