I have been a customer of 1and1 Internet for over ten years now – though I can’t for the life of me understand why. When it comes to customer service they are, by far, the worst company I have ever used – and I’ve used BT!

Other website hosting companies, such as United Hosting, have a response time to emails of around two minutes – 1and1’s response time can be measured in weeks. I am not kidding. If you send an email to their server247@1and1.com email address you may as well be writing your message on a piece of parchment, rolling it up, sticking it in a bottle and lobbing it in the Mersey. They’re a joke, and they don’t care.

They recently emailed their long standing customers to notify us (with just a couple of weeks’ notice) that they were changing the IP addresses on their dedicated servers. This means if you have any scripts using IP addresses, or any zone file records set up with domains using the IP addresses, you need to change them. Not a quick process.

Naturally things went wrong and I had to throw my bottle into the Mersey in a bid to get some support. Knowing how awful they are, as I do, I also chased them via Facebook. It seems this is the only way to get any sort of response (they ignore Twitter, check #1and1 and you’ll see why they stay off it). I sent them this message via their Facebook Page.

I am sending this to you here as well as via email to the server support team because they are so utterly useless at replying and we have sites which are down.

You have changed my IP address as per your below email, but the new IP address is not available in the IIS on the server for me to apply to the websites. As a result, many of the sites we have on the server are down. Please advise or fix.

www.**********.co.uk for example is down.

‘Brittany’ from 1and1’s social media team responded with the following:

Hi Darren,

I am very sorry for the continued frustration! There is an escalated ticket with our Server Team and they are working on this now. I will keep an eye on the account and provide an update as soon as possible.

Thanks, Brittany

This is what I don’t understand. It’s not difficult to be good at customer service. Just respond to people, keep them updated and let them know they’re not being ignored. I ranted at them to make such a point.

If there is an escalated ticket why don’t they have the common decency to reply and say that? It’s standard customer service to let your customers know what is going on, not ignore them. No wonder your company has such a poor reputation, you’re doing nothing to help it. I’ve even had customer feedback survey emails from 1and1 asking how well you’ve dealt with problems before I’ve even had a reply to the problem. It’s a joke.

It’s true – their automated customer feedback survey emails can arrive days, or even weeks, before they actually reply to the problem. Surely they must wonder why their feedback is always so bad?

Then, as if she was trying to piss me off, she responded with this.

Hi Darren,

I will definitely pass this feedback along to our developers. Thanks so much for your patience regarding this.

Brittany

Several hours passed and nothing from 1and1’s technical support. No update, no acknowledgement of the email, nothing. So I chased again – feeling the whole debacle was futile at this stage.

Any danger of 1and1 doing something about this, or even replying? Should I just say enough is enough and cancel the dedicated server I have with you?

Shortly after I did receive an email from 1and1 offering a ‘how-to’ guide on adding a new IP address to a Windows 2008 Server. Of course, the server I have with them is 2003 – a fact I had to reply and tell them (you’d think they’d know). Incredibly, they responded with this:

Right, but Windows Server 2003 is no longer supported. The only instructions we have are for Windows Server 2008.

So they’re happy to take my money every month for a dedicated server, but they couldn’t give a duck’s f*ck about any problems I have?

Why am I still with these morons?

This issue is ongoing…

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