I doubt anyone from 1 and 1 Internet will ever read this rant. But if you do, this first two paragraph should be sufficient for you to discover why I think you are the worst hosting company in the world. It will only take 5 minutes of your time.

You suck not because you sent me to a collection agency- it was never my intention not to pay you, canceling my credit card was the only way to insure my hosting account with you will be canceled. I knew you are going to send me to collections, you have made it clear in our phone conversations. You suck because you failed to satisfy a potential client who was willing to pay you $1,200 a year for indefinite period of time. This potential client also was your affiliate, but no longer do I wish to promote your products. In fact I will use every opportunity to tell my colleagues and friends about my experience. You guys need to get your act together and at least make an attempt to show you care about your clients.

Now the longer version for rest of my visitors. I have to point out that this issue has nothing to do with the quality of their services or their hardware, it is about complete and utter failure of their customer service side of business.

Back in December, I was faced with an urgent need of a dedicated box, which actually proved to be a false “alarm” since my shared host handles double amount of traffic now. I decided to give 1 & 1 Internet a try. One thing worried me at the time of moving my websites to 1 & 1- their MySQL version was older from what my current shared host was using. With some hesitation I went ahead and ordered the dedicated box. I was impressed by the attention of a sales rep with whom I spoke on the phone. That was the only time I received any attention from them by the way. So I went ahead knowing that I would have to spend considerable amount of time and effort to work around the issues of exporting MySQL databases and reverting them to the older version. At the end it proved to be beyond my expertise and my patience. After a week of unsuccessful attempts I decided to cancel my account being fully aware that I will have to pay an extra set up fee associated with set up fees- if I stayed with 1 & 1 the set up fee would have been waved. I was also assured in the conversation by the sales representative that I should have no problem to cancel my account. So I did. I logged into my account and canceled my plan. Little did I know that in order to cancel your dedicated hosting plan with 1 & 1 you need to fax in or mail in the cancellation request and it is impossible to cancel your account online.

One month went by – I noticed a charge to my credit card but did not make an issue out of it. I just presumed it was the set up fee. Another months goes by another charge. Call to customer support reveals that I did not follow the procedure properly in canceling my account- it was canceled only partially the domains but the dedicated box. You see 1 & 1 has fine print in their TOS- a nice way to say that your customer is always wrong. There in the fine print it says that you can’t cancel your plan without faxing such a request with your signature to 1 & 1. No kidding! It took them 5 seconds to process my card via their websites at the time of the sign up….

I called several other times in attempt to speak to a supervisor or some one who had an authority to help me. Guess what, never got to speak to any one like that. I felt that their customer service people are trained to dump you once you ask for some one in the higher up position. I also Tweeted to my friends on Twitter and they tried to refer me to people they knew at 1 & 1- but all my efforts seemed to run into an endless circle of one person passing me onto another. The end result? The 1 & 1 Internet send me to collection agency since I canceled my credit card after I was charged three months in the row for the service I never used and in good faith believed to have canceled it.

In my opinion 1 & 1 is the worst web host I have ever caame across and I am sure I will never consider them in the future.