I am currently hosted with 1and1 UK, however I will be moving as soon as my billing period is up. I was semi-happy with them until last week.

One thing that always annoyed me was their stupid usernames. For example my FTP login name is u123456-nighthawk, you are stuck with the uXXXX prefix on all login names, which is a serious pain in the ass.

however my problem started last week. 1and1 bills you on a 6 month basis, and last friday I got a letter through the post telling me that my january payment had been rejected, and that I had 8 days to pay or my account would be suspended. This was the first I had heard of the payment failing, no emails or anything.

SO i dived straight onto the website, and after 15 mins of looking I couldnt find any way to actually pay. There was a section where you could edit your payment details, which I did, but no button to try and pay. After searching through the extremely poor help files, I discovered that when you change your details, it automatically trys to take payment again.

Again I recieved no emails to tell me if payment had succeeded/failed. Then 3 days later I discovered my website had been pulled. Apparently payment had failed. I went onto the website and entered my payment details AGAIN, to trigger an event. Again no confirmation of success / failure.

I sent a rather annoyed email to support using their contact form.... they dont even use a ticketing system. My website reappeared after an hour or two, so presumably payment succeeded?

3 days later I recieved a reply to my rather urgent email asking for the site to be restored, saying simply that my site was restored and payment had been recieved.

I am taking my business elsewhere when my account expires, i no longer trust their billing system and am less than satisfied with their tech support. 3 days to reply to an email is simply not acceptable.

Tip: register you domain name and hosting packages at different companies. This will save you endless ammount of headaches if you ever need to switch hosting to another company. Personally, I use GoDaddy for my domain names and partly iPowerWeb, partly my own server on my home DSL for hosting.

The home server/DSL is for things I cannot host at godaddy, such as source code repositories and other software that needs a root user to install. The iPowerWeb is for the main site and the large downloads.

@alnite: This is not the place to skimp, this is likely the least expensive thing you pay in a month too for what you get.

@Sanders: Heard FAR too many horror stories with godaddy about them locking up domains if you try to transfer them. Heck I ran my own hosting company with a friend for about 3 years and dreaded dealing with them. Domain transfer once took 5 months and a lawyer to get it done finally. But that's just my mileage.

Quote:Original post by alnite
@Sander: but wouldn't having both from one company save you money? They usually offer deals like free domain registration if you buy one of their offers.

It'll save you about $8 on a yearly basis. Really not wirth my while when switching hosting providers.

Quote:Original post by Mike2343
@Sanders: Heard FAR too many horror stories with godaddy about them locking up domains if you try to transfer them. Heck I ran my own hosting company with a friend for about 3 years and dreaded dealing with them. Domain transfer once took 5 months and a lawyer to get it done finally. But that's just my mileage.

Then register them at a different registrar, but still keep it away from your hosting provider. The problem of having your domain and your hosting at the same place is that as soon as you switch hosting, you need to transfer your domain as well. This takes time and effort by the hosting company you are leaving. They don't feel very inclined to help you since you're about to become an ex-customer. The result: long downtimes.

If you keep your domain separate, you can simply log in and change the nameservers to the new hoster, then disable the old hosting 48 hours later (when the news DSN settings have propagated over the net). No downtime during the switchover. No hassle.