What you should know before hosting your website with 1&1 in the UK

From the outset, let me make the following points clear:

1. All of the scenarios described here have happened to me personally and are not third hand accounts.
2. I have been using 1&1's managed servers and several shared hosting accounts for 5 years.
3. All of my dealings have been with 1&1 in the UK and I am based in the UK.
4. I will stand by everything I've said on this page and will vigourously defend my right to say it.

Telephone Support staff are powerless to help

Some of 1&1's telephone support is handled from a call centre in the Philippines. In fact every time I call them I am speaking to someone in the Philippines. Their English language skills are acceptable and I've had no problems communicating with them. But, if like myself, you have genuine problem with a managed server or shared hosting account, these support people cannot help you. The people who answer the phones have very limited technical knowledge and do not have physical access to the servers. They can guide you through information found in the guides on their website, but that is all. If there is a genuine problem with your server (which seem to be quite common - see below), all they can do is raise a ticket with the server administrators at the data-centre in Germany. The telephone support staff are totally powerless to help resolve your problem and cannot give you either an estimation of how long it will take to solve the problem, or even an idea of when someone might take look at the problem. They will typically give the stock answer of 24 to 48 hours. If you press them about this they will say that within 1 to 2 hours you will get an email to update you of the progress, but this rarely happens.

Server administrators are not directly contact-able by anybody

The really, is the most shocking aspect of 1&1's whole business. The telephone support staff you speak to in the Philippines do not have telephone access to the server administrators in Germany. They don't even have voice communications via VoIP. At least that is what they insist when I call them. All they can do is log problems in their computer system and use a messenger application to attempt to contact the server administrators in Germany. Often, when I have refused to end the call until someone does something to help, the call centre staff complain that the people in Germany are not answering the messenger messages. And it gets worse! Not only are the telephone support staff completely cut-off, their supervisors and the management of the call centres are also cut-off. I have argued until I'm blue in the face with “supervisors” and “managers”, that “somebody at the call centre must be able to place a telephone call to the data-centre”, and every single time I have been told this is not possible the server administrators do not receive telephone calls from anybody - period.

If what they are telling me is true: this means that when you purchase hosting from 1&1, you are effectively renting a server located in a data-centre in Germany, that nobody can contact if there is a fault - or worse: if the administrators looking after your website in Germany decide to take arbitrary action against your website.

Server administrators take arbitrary action

I have experienced multiple instances where the server administrators have taken action against a website without giving either myself or my clients proper time to prepare or to resolve an issue. The worst thing is once they have taken action against you, all you can do is call the people in the Philippines. The server administrators are totally insulated from having to deal with the fallout caused by their actions.

One thing I have experienced multiple times is where the administrators receive some bogus complaints of spam - almost certainly from AOL or Yahoo! members who have subscribed to opt-in services then click the “spam” button when they are bored and no longer want to receive the emails. Then, 1&1 have closed either entire servers, or changed the ownership of key site files to root - which has resulted in the websites going off-line. In one instance they sent an email to a client of mine on a Friday evening, to say they have received a lot of complaints about spam. The email said that if my client did't get back to them with an explanation in 48 hours they were going to close the servers. Like most offices, we are closed at the weekend and the earliest my client could contact me was first thing Monday morning. So my client replied to the email (see note below about why 1&1 loose your emails) and explained how they are registered under the UK Data Protection Act and only use opt-in emails. First thing Monday morning, whilst I was stuck in a telephone queue to speak to a 1&1 support agent, they took the server offline! As you can imagine - for a business that generates all it's revenues online, my client was most distressed. But guess what, the call centre staff wouldn't help. Their only advice was to reply to abuse@1and1.co.uk to explain why we were spamming (which we were not). The abuse department, are not available by telephone and will not speak to anybody - they will only communicate by email. So it took many hours on the phone pleading with 1&1 and almost a day to get this server back online.


In another instance, 1&1 administrators cost my client £1,000s in lost revenue because they restored a 2 week old backup on my clients website without giving any advance notice. They didn't even tell us after they had done it. We only found out because they botched the restore process and didn't restore the database properly and the website started sending me error emails. When I logged in to see what the cause of the problem was, I found the last 2 weeks worth of log files missing - not only my log files but the server access log files which are impossible for me to delete because they are owned by user root on managed servers. When I telephoned them and asked them what had happened, they point blank denied any involvement and told me to write them an email explaining why I thought they had deleted my files? How crazy is that? I argued this point until I was blue in the face and they categorically denied any rollback had taken place. After getting nowhere I asked them to restore a newer backup, this took another 3 days to complete and was 6 days behind when it was eventually restored - although they didn't restore it - they simply dumped all the files in a temporary folder and left me to go and fix the site for myself. By this time I was seething mad and threatening to sue them if they didn't tell me what was going on and a few days later I received an email from their server administrators to say they had to do the initial restore because of a hardware fault on the hard drive. This despite the fact they had told me categorically this hadn't happened, and despite the fact the server had showed no signs of difficulty and I had received no warning emails from my site to alert me of any problems.

Backups are not as they claim

The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted that 1&1 claim to do daily backups. I personally, and I state this as opinion and not fact, believe this is not the case, because 1&1 were unable to restore a backup from the day prior to the managed server problems I have just mentioned. On the several other occasions when their hardware has failed (usually hard drive failures) they have also restored out of date backups from several days prior to the hardware failure. When I have complained, the newest I've gotten is 2 days prior and again only received a copy of the files and had to merge them in to the site myself.

Support staff not knowing their own products

On several occasions when I have called the support staff to report a server that is not responding, I have had the most bizarre conversations with them.

One time, I called to say my server was not responding and I couldn't access the server via HTTP, FTP, or SSH. The support agent's response to this was SSH does not come with shared hosting accounts! It does, the access details are given in the Control Panel, and I've been using SSH on shared hosting accounts for years! But all that was irrelevant because I wasn't calling about a shared hosting account - I was calling about a managed server. It took me another 20 minutes before he would even acknowledge there was a problem with my server, before telling me he had escalated the problem to the server administrators and there was nothing more he could do.


Another time, I called them when I was experiencing the same problem with a different server. I explained that I could not access the server at all. The support agent said all was working fine and he could access it without any problems. I was puzzled, so I SSH'd in to another server at 1&1 and tried to SSH out to the server I couldn't access. It didn't work - the server wasn't responding to anything. The support agent insisted it was and told me to go to admin.1and1.co.uk and see for myself. This guy was trying to tell me that because the Control Panel as accessible, my server was therefore accessible.

Reliability issues

Five years ago when I first started using 1&1, I found their servers and shared hosting to be super-reliable. For years I had virtually no problems at all and started recommending 1&1 to all my clients. Then just over two years ago things started going downhill very rapidly. Servers would randomly stop responding, database servers on shared hosting accounts would not be accessible. On one of my shared hosting websites I would get half a dozen emails a day from the website to say it couldn't access the database server. When I called 1&1 the support staff refused to help. They tried to blame the website for being too busy or for opening too many connections to the shared database server. This was clearly nonsense, because the website was only getting one visitor every five minutes on average, pages were generated in less than 0.1 seconds (including the DB connection and query) and I was logging all the opening an closing connections whilst trying to diagnose the problem with the limited access I had. When I offered to send them my log of all database connections, and the log of database connection failures, they didn't want to know. They certainly didn't want to acknowledge any problem - a problem that still persists to this day with another of my clients sites.

Lost support emails

Often, when you call 1&1, I find they cannot help. So I will be told to email the server administrators, the complaints department, customer support, etc. They don't tell you to include things such as the account number etc, because they say their system automatically routes your email to the correct person and automatically adds a note to their customer database. If you ask how this happens, they don't know. “it just does”. Well guess what, it doesn't or the last time I tried it didn't and here's why I think this happens: the only way it can match your email to a hosting account is by looking at the email address you sent the email from and matching it to their customer accounts database. Sounds straight forward until you realise that some people have multiple accounts or use different email addresses from home when trying to solve a problem at 10 pm to the one they use during office hours. Same issue if you have a Blackberry or PDA. If the email address you use to contact them doesn't match an account on their system, you don't get a reply and they deny they ever received your email. I've even sent emails to 1&1 and the replies have gone to a colleague of mine on a completely different email address.

Lack of communication from Server Administrators

If you have a technical problem that requires the intervention of a server administrator (read: quite regularly for me), you rarely get an email to say the problem is solved. It is up to you to keep checking to see if your website has come back online. If you are lucky enough to get an email, it usually says something along these lines, “your website is accessible, if you have any other problems please contact us”, with no acknowledgment that there was ever a problem and no explanation or advice to prevent the problem occurring again.

Ridiculous Restrictions

Picture this scenario: you own a website with data you want to share with another website. There are lots of ways to get your data across to the other website, one way is by FTP transfer. The version of PHP compiled on 1&1's shared hosting and managed servers are not the default installation. They are customised by 1&1, so if there was anything they didn't want (for example SQLite in PHP 5) they compile PHP without it. Now, if they didn't want you to use FTP in PHP (which can only be used for outgoing connections), they should not have included it - but they did. So I wrote a PHP script to upload some files each morning via FTP. Several months later I start getting complaints from their server administrators that something on my website is making outgoing connections and that hackers might be exploiting a security hole in open source software I might be using. Well, for one I never use open source PHP scripts - I write every line of code myself, and two, no matter how many times I explained it was just FTP, they routinely sent out more messages. Luckily this seems to have stopped now.

Another restriction a client came across was on the size of MySQL databases. At the time 1&1 did not tell people about the 100MB limit. One day, a client's site went past that limit and it brought the website down because the website could no longer write to the database. When we called 1&1 they told us about the 100MB limit. When we complained they had not told us of this and we could have planned for it had we known, they said it is made clear on their website. I asked “ where exactly” and the support agent could not tell me. He went away for 10 minutes to find out. When he came back he said he couldn't find it, but it was there. Well, it wasn't and eventually, after a lot of arguing between my client and a manager (this was before the support calls were handled in the Philippines) they conceded and offered to help move the website to a dedicated server.

Nobody will speak to you about complaints

After getting the run-around from the support staff, and no response from the server administrators, you won't be surprised to learn the only way to contact the complaints department is via email! I've no idea what level of support they can offer - I gave up trying a long time ago.

I am not alone!

My experience might sound extreme, almost unbelievable at times, but guess what? I am not alone!
Other people have experienced shocking service from this company.

1. http://www.bankraid.com
2. http://www.chrisbeach.co.uk/view/tech/avoid_oneandone_internet
3. http://www.coffeebration.com/?p=448
4. http://www.1888discuss.com/web-hosting/t-1and1-sucks-1and1-web-hosting--18.html