Welcome to part I in a two-part series about web “service” providers whose offerings are… less than completely Scottish. We’re holding off on part II until we can get fully-away from the other provider, but today I’m warning everyone to avoid doing business with 1and1.com.
1and1 was the domain registrar for boostpro.com for years without incident, but when we decided to point at a different DNS server a couple of weeks ago, their interface was broken: the little drop-down menu that is supposed look like the one on the left, instead came up in the broken state you see above, with the “Edit DNS” entry missing. Hilarity ensued, and after many hours on the phone with their friendly but ultimately powerless tech support people in the Philippines, I got the issue escalated to their second-level tech support. Now,“second level tech support” never talks to customers, so you don’t really know what they’re doing over there, and everything takes just about 24-48 hours to happen. We waited and waited for the issue to be resolved, and after a couple of days the nameservers magically changed: to 1and1′s own servers!
That would have been fine, but the menu was still broken so we had no way to add domain records on 1and1′s servers. More hours on the phone with tech support and many supposed “escalations” later, and nothing was fixed. We asked to speak to the manager of the tech support people (in several different calls) and were told that the manager was unavailable. We were constantly being “assured” that the problem was being handled, but nothing changed.
Eventually we decided we had to get the domain registration away from 1and1 so we could regain control of the situation, so we unlocked the domain in 1and1′s interface, and initiated a domain transfer. The next day we called their tech support line again to check on the progress of the transfer and were told that nothing was happening because the domain was still locked! Meanwhile, our subdomains of boostpro.com, which had at least remained functional there, suddenly acquired the same status as the parent domain. Things were going from bad to worse.
We unlocked the domain again and called back. We were then told that it would take five days for them to release the domain, and there was nothing they could do to expedite that process. Furthermore, while the transfer was pending, they claimed they could not set up an “A” record on their own DNS servers to point back at our site. Somehow, despite the extremely poor service we had received, the people we could reach, and even the people they could reach, had no ability to directly access the DNS or domain registration servers in question. They could only access internal controls that allowed them to make changes with two- to five-day delays attached. This policy may reduce their overall costs and liability, but it prevents them from providing anything approaching real service in case of a problem. All told, boostpro.com was out of commission for ten whole days.
1and1 is clearly operationally broken, but we’ve learned a valuable lesson: when choosing a service provider, the good days are almost irrelevant. The important thing is whether they can respond compentently, effectively, and energetically in case of a crisis.