OneandOne

Check out this great blog - How to Create Website - for more info on the various options for making a website.  Its targeted at the beginning website owner who wants a website but doesn’t have the time/energy to learn html and css on their own.  Check it out!

Intro:

Ok, so I’ve gathered a good sample of independent, unbaised web hosting reviews for OneandOne. The methodology I used to find them was simply google searching “oneandone” or “oneandone review,” and and all the various iterations of that, and doing searches for OneandOne on several web hosting forums that I frequent. Most of the posts came came from forums and blogs - which means the are the real opinions and experiences of real people, unlike the reviews you see at any one of those “top web hosting” sites, which in reality are usually just slick advertising campaigns for the web hosting companies that are willing to pay enough to be put on the list of “top hosts.”

I have copied quotes from each of the reviews below, and written one of my own, so that the process for how firehosts.net ranks websites is truely transperent. Too stay compliant with copyright laws, I have not copied entire posts, but simply a short except, and then provided a link to the original copy of each of the reviews.

Numerical ranking for OneandOne:

Total reviews: 73

Total points: 142

Average score: 1.9 / 5

* On many reviews the reviewer did not provide a numerical ranking, so I have assigned a number to their review as fairly and consistently as I could.

Review overview and summary:

An overview of the reviews reveals that most of the negative reviews were extremely negative, especially in reference to their domain services, but also with their hosting packages. Many people even accused OneandOne of theft and other ethical trangressions, and there were a number of individuals that even reported OneandOne to the Better Business Bureau, Federal Trade Comission, and other similar regulative bodies. The negative reviews that weren’t extreme enough to allege theft mostly focused on the horrible customer support, and painfully bad backend management.

The neutral reviews mostly said they were willing to overlook some of the negatives like the customer support since the prices were right, or that they never had to deal with customer support, etc.

The positive reviews mostly centered around a rich features package, especially for their dedicated servers and their security features.

Verdict:

Extremely Bad - the worst of the worst of the larger web hosting companies. The only companies worse than OneandOne are the fly-by-night small operators that will take your money/credit card information straight away and never give you anything back. OneandOne will actually give you web hosting, but will also give you a giant headache along with it.

Hi everybody - this is Max Johnson - founder of the web hosting review Firehosts.net. This is my personal experience I had as a customer of OneandOne and their terrible web hosting service (1&1, One&One, 1and1, One and One, however you want to write it). Here’s a brief overview of what happened to me:

So, back when I was still relatively new at web design, I was cruising around the net looking for web hosting after my bad experience with Startlogic, and I found OneandOne at one of those “Top Ten Hosting” pages that supposedly reviews the different hosting companies and declares which ones are the top ten to deal with (last time I ever trust one of those sites, by the way). I see OneandOne on there and along with checking out a couple of other ones decide that OneandOne looks pretty good and the price is right for both their hosting and their domain registration. So I decide to bite and buy a domain and the basic hosting to go along with it. This is where the headache starts.

I start getting set up, and the control panel OneandOne has is just about the worst thing to work with. Ever. Impossible to do anything I want, and there’s no support documents anywhere that tell me what I need to know in order to be able to figure it out. I mean, seriously, it wouldn’t cost OneandOne all that much time/money to pay somebody to write up some REAL support documents that actually tell people how to use the hosting services. And I already know a thing or two about building a website - I can’t imagine how terrible this would be if I were a total newbie…

So, as I’m wrangling with the hosting and trying to figure it out, I make my second major mistake - I decide to buy a second domain from OneandOne. Stupid.

I go through with the process, my credit card is charged, and I wait three days, and the domain doesn’t show up in my account with OneandOne online… So, starting to feel kind of frustrated, I decide I’ll call up customer service and see whats up.

A lady answers the phone, and I literally can’t understand a word she says. Part of the problem is the accent, which I don’t recognize and can’t understand. Also, the volume coming from her end is extremely low, so I have to strain to hear it. 10 minutes of wrangling with her we’re still at square one and she hasn’t been able to understand my problem.

I start demanding to talk to her manager, but she keeps refusing me - says he’s busy and unavailable to talk to customers at that time… Now I’m starting to get kind of pissed. I tell her to take down my phone number and have her manager call me when he is available.

Five business days later I still haven’t heard back from OneandOne. I call the customer service again. Same run around - this time the dude on the other end of the line understands my problem, but can’t help me with it - he doesn’t understand what is wrong on their end. Six more phone calls to OneandOne (all initiated by me) and I’ve still gotten nowhere. There is no customer follow up, and I never talk to the same person twice. Half the people either can’t understand me or I can’t understand them.

So, after about a month of wrangling, I finally give up and want to cancel my hosting, get my money back for the domain I never received, and transfer my other domain away from OneandOne over to a different host. Hah! Good luck…

I’m going to spare the rest of the details, but suffice it to say that six months later I finally got reimbursed for the domain that I never got, and two more months after that I was able to transfer my domain away from OneandOne. I never got back my money from the hosting and ended up paying for the whole 12 months. Anyway, at least I was able to prevent them from charging my account for more time by proactively calling them up and swearing at them over and over again…

In summary, my customer experience with OneandOne was the worst customer experience I’ve ever had… Hands down. The small amount of money I saved by going with OneandOne was definitely not worth the headache and pain of the experience.

I hope this post and my independent, unbiased web hosting review site will help prevent anyone else from having the same terrible experience I had with OneandOne…

Peace,

-Max Johnso

“I must say that their support simply sucks.”

“Thier email server are known for transmitting SPAM and viruses.”

“Don’t expect to get a reply to your email for at least 4-5 days. And I do say least. Normally you get a reply within 8-10.”

“They Are Recommended, Though There Control Panel Is Confusing To Use At First.”

“NOT impressed so far.”