If you subscribe to any tech magazine you have probably seen the multi-page 1&1.com ads. These folks are magazine advertising hounds. I’m not talking just one page, but three, four, five or more full page magazine ads.

A few months back as a test I decided to sign up for them for hosting some potential new project domains, but ultimately cancelled in time to take advantage of their money back guarantee. The only thing I paid for was the hundreds of dollars of software that they sold for shipping & handling only ($6.95 + tax). The software was mostly filler garbage and not worth writing about here. The hosting itself was ok, reliable while I was with them and not on some overcrowded virtual server. The hosting seemed to be worth the price.

But the customer service? Man, it was lacking.

A couple times I called and couldn’t even reach a human being because they phone just kept me on endless hold or skipped me to some machine saying. After seeing years worth of advertising I wanted to see if these guys were as good as their prices. Surprise (not) they make up for those great prices with a lack of solid customer support. At least that is what I experienced while there.

They also have some odd quirks like when you first register a domain and signup they put a placeholder page with links back to them on your domain. If you don’t change this page then you are advertising for them for free. That would be fine with me if they would have made those affiliate links (they have an affiliate program for referring hosting customers), but they didn’t do that. So any new domain you signup and host with them you have to go in and change that page to something of your own or add your 1&1 affiliate links. Not sure if it’s that way for every account but it worked that way for my virtual business account.

Also, the 1&1 advertised monthly prices aren’t really monthly payments. You have to pay three months at a time. It says that in the fine print of the agreement but I don’t like that kind of advertising. Big print giveth, small print ….

If you advertising a monthly rate, then people should be able to pay monthly, even if it’s only a few bucks a month. I chose the $9.99/mo plan so I ended up paying $30 USD + the software.

And so I was gone from their hosting. Not because of the payment structure or the service or anything they really did wrong, just that my testing was done and decided not to launch those projects.

One thing, however, I didn’t test was 1&1’s standalone domain hosting service. They offer extremely competitive pricing: $5.99/year for .com, .net, .org domains. This month we had a batch of a dozen or so domains coming up for renewal so we chose two of them and decided to transfer those to 1&1 and see how things went in this department.

The process itself is pretty straightforward and you follow a set of form based webpage screens. Enter in your domain and then indicate you are the owner and then setup a 1&1 account. I was a bit bummed that I couldn’t just reactivate my old account and instead had to sign up anew. This will make their member numbers look a lot bigger than they actually are if it’s that way for everybody. Anyway, I registered for the site again and then paid for the two domains to be transferred.

Next I waited for them to send the domain transfer email to the admin-c contact. And waited. Sheesh, this waiting was like calling their customer support line. The emails never came.

My first email was a request to resend the requests. This email was sent to their support on 4/1/2006 at 10:29am PST. Their response arrived 4/4/2006 at 4:41:

Thank you for contacting us. Due to a significant increase in the number of support
inquiries we have received during the past few days. We
sincerely apologize for this unforeseen delay. We normally
reply to the email within 24 hours.

The email went on to say they resent the domain transfer to the admin-c. Then I received a second email at about the same time:

Thank you for contacting us.

It will only be sent to the admin-c on the domain name. I will resend it there.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

–
Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXXX
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

> Can you please resend the transfer request email to
> [admin-c email address was listed]

The support person who responded — 3+ days later — didn’t even compare that the email address I asked them to resend to was the same as the admin-c. Not good.

So I waited for another 12 hours and emailed them a second time. And then a third. Finally at 5:30am pst on the 4th day an email arrived. Strangely the transfer emails weren’t coming from 1&1 but from the following, which I wrote back to them:

Ahh, ok, it’s not being sent from 1and1.com, it’s being sent from
Schlund+Partner [transfers at registrar.schlund.info]

I received a response to that within 12 hours saying that I needed to wait 7-10 days for the process to go through, which is just fine, I understand it takes awhile for transfers. What I didn’t get was why they didn’t tell customers what email to look for? I did a search back through my email and saw that I hadn’t received anything from Schlund+Partner either.

Needless to say, just like the hosting, I felt like their process was good if there was no need to actually contact them. Sometimes you need to contact your host or registrar, which in that case you want to be able to reach somebody within a reasonable period of time. One business day I think is reasonable, but not 3 or 4.

Anyway, the process is still going along and in the meantime I get this customer service survey. I don’t usually fill these out, but it irritated me just enough that here we are not even done with the process per their own email and they want to know what I think of their customer service?

Ask me when the transaction is actually complete, not in the middle of the 7-10 days. Needless to say, and this might be me being a picky customer, but I answered their survey with my current feelings not only from my past hosting experience (nearly 90 days) but this domain transfer process.

Their questions are italicyzed and my answers are bolded below.

How efficiently did we solve your problem?
highly efficient
efficient
average
inefficient
completely inefficient

How do you rate our mail response time?
very short
short but acceptable
average
long but acceptable
unacceptably long

How friendly was the support person dealing with your query?
very friendly
friendly
average
not friendly
rude

How competent was the support person dealing with your query?
highly competent
competent
average
incompetent
highly incompetent

These 1&1 customer service experiences are the reason I don’t shop for the cheapest price. 1&1 clearly wants to be the cheapest and my hope for them to be anything different have been spoiled. In my experience the cheapest and the best quality are not the same. It might be an old cliche, but it holds true. But how much service does one need from a domain registrar?

In my experience the registrar doesn’t really have to do much except process renewals. I’m not sure I can count on 1&1 yet. I wish they had waited to send me this survey until after they’d actually completed the work. Ever got a customer survey in the middle of the process like this?

Any other 1&1 customers reading this with a different take on how good/bad/indifferent is their customer service? Maybe I just caught a bad patch 4 or 5 spotty customer support situations and this isn’t indicative of how things normally work?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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