1and1.com techs are incompetent

Around 3 am 1and1.com's data center tech replaced the ram in the 1and1.com server and never bothered to check if server booted back up when he was done. It didn't. Anyone even marginally qualified to work on a server would have made sure the server came back up.

When I got up around 6:30 am I noticed that the server was down and called 1and1.com's tech support. The tech found that the file system was corrupt and tried to fix it using the fsck utility. It couldn't be fixed so he asked that I make a current backup so they could replace the disk drives and re-image the server's operating system. He estimated that it would take about 2 hours to complete the drive replacement and re-image. This was the only person at 1and1.com I've talked to who seemed to know what he was doing.

I made the best backups I could with the damaged file system and at 7:30 am I called 1and1.com tech support and told them the backup was done and they could work on the server. The data center tech spent all day replacing the drives and re-imaging the server. I called them every few hours to check on the status of the repair and was told they were having problems getting server to re-image. They spent all day (10.5 hours) trying to get the server back up. Any good technician would have realized that the server had more hardware problems and replaced it with a new server. Not at 1and1.com, you have to prove that the hardware is bad before they'll replace the server. They won't accept the fact that it locks up three or four times a day as proof that the server is bad.

They were supposed to phone and email me when they finished but they never did. At around 6:00 pm I noticed that server had just come back up and I reloaded the most critical websites and got them back online.

1and1.com finally emailed me at 10:55 am the next morning to let me know that they were done.