Emailing 1and.com management about the server problems

At 7:10 pm I emailed everyone I could think of at 1and1 telling them about the problems. I emailed the complaint address I got from tech support. I also sent the email to sales, billing, support, and their press contact. I even sent a copy to the press contact in Germany since that's where their main office is.

from Harold Hankins
to complaints@1and1.com, info@1and1.com, billing@1and1.com, support@1and1.com
cc press@1and1.com, presse@united-internet.de
date Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 7:10 PM
subject Poor support - Customer ID 8544991

I've been a 1and1 customer for domain registrations for around 5 years. The server I was using at Hostway was getting old, we'd had it for 6 or 8 years. I decided to switch to 1and1 for hosting since the domain registrations were there. BIG MISTAKE. Since I started loading websites on your server 3 days ago the server has been down more than it's been up.

Your company has no competent support. The technicians in the data center replaced the ram in my server yesterday around 3 am and never even bothered to check if the server booted up when they were done. It was still down when I got up at 6 am. I called tech support and got the only good support I've gotten from you. The tech booted the server in recovery mode, found that the file system was corrupt and couldn't be fixed with fsck. He had me make a backup that was current and put in an order for the data center techs to replace the drives and re-image the server. They worked on what should have been a 2 hour job for 11 hours. From 7:30 am until around 6 pm. Any competent tech having that much trouble trying to load the os would have realized there were problems with the server and replaced it. I then spent a couple of hours getting the most critical websites back up. It ran until around 11:30 am and locked up again. I found out around 3 pm and called tech support again. He wanted me to back up the server again and reimage it. Said that you need proof that it's a hardware problem before replacing the server. That was just stupid, it took the techs on site 11 hours to reimage it because they had problems. After talking a while the best he could suggest was that I order another server and move to it and that he'd waive the cancellation fees on this server and credit back the startup costs. That's even stupider. Why should I put out the money to order another server and wait for it to be credited back. Any reputable hosting company would fix the problem.

You can probably guess what I'm going to be posting on my blog and other forums about 1and1.

Harold Hankins
(702)xxx-xxxx

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