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
