A rare warning - Avoid 1and1.com web hosting

UPDATE 8/30/05: As of this morning, my logfiles have been restored, including the logfiles for the past 6 days. Tech support had originally told me these would be lost. I have received no notification of what happened. -- Douglas

Regular readers will note that it is a rare occasion when I warn you away from any book, software or vendor, unless I believe there is a danger of it costing you money or reputation. Unfortunately, this is one of those times.

I moved to 1and1.com web hosting a few months ago after requesting recommendation from friends and peers. I needed a bigger monthly bandwidth allotment due to the growing popularity of my podcast, Career Opportunities. Additionally, after a month or so with them, I set up sites for several clients. Over the last 2-3 weeks, though, I have become very dissatisfied with their service.

The first issue was a small, but annoying, difficulty in setting up my custom 404 error page. The welchwrite.com domain hosts a variety of information on everything from high-tech careers to gardening to photos. I set up a custom error page that allows users to do a search of the entire web site or click a link to go to each of the major sections. After attempting to set up this page myself, and reading the FAQs, I contacted the 1and1 technical support line. After several emails and calls, including getting incorrect information on setting up the page (I am using their MS IIS hosting plan, not Linux, but they told me on numerous occasions to set up an htaccess file) I finally got someone on the phone the seemed to know what they were doing. Unfortunately, they made the problem worse. Now, instead of the default IIS error page, or my custom error page, users simply get a message 'The file specified could not be found." Now, the default IIS error page is fairly useless in itself, but it is certainly better than this.

A week or so later, I set up a client on the 1and1 Exchange hosting platform. This is a critical need as the client's email server had crashed beyond repair and they critically needed to restore their email services. After working my way through a relatively complicated setup procedure I had everyone working. With days, though, 1and 1 suffered a 12-14 hour outage on their Exchange servers. As you might imagine, this client was quite concerned and their displeasure was not limited to 1and1, but also to myself, who recommended the company. Mail was restored, though, and seems to be working fine at this time.

Then, when the client wanted to add web hosting services to their contract with 1and1 we discovered an entirely new problem. Initially I was told that I would have to destroy and re-create all the current Exchange accounts in order to move the domain names from the Exchange servers to the web hosting servers. This was, of course, unacceptable due to down time and the potential for lost mail, so I escalated the issue to a supervisor. Luckily, he was able to direct me to a, quite cumbersome, procedure, that would allow me to move the domains without totally destroying the Exchange mailboxes. As I was working through the process, though, I eventually discovered that I would have to setup the Exchange accounts all over again, even though I did not lose the existing email.

Finally, as a podcaster, and as a podcaster who recently started accepting advertising, my web site statistics are very important to me. In fact, I get paid for my advertising directly in relation to the number of times my podcasts are downloaded. You can imagine my dismay when I discovered that on August 23 that all logfiles for my web site (and other MS IIS hosted sites at 1and1.com) stopped. Despite a number of phone calls and support emails I have not been given any information when these logfiles might be restored, although I have received, rather vague, mentions from the support techs that there was indeed a problem on their end.

As this is taking money directly out of my pocket, it seems my only recourse at this time is to move my site, yet again, to another web host and hope that their service and support are of a higher quality. I am terribly disappointed with 1and1.com service and support and wonder if their ubiquitous advertising in many major tech publications has led them to grow faster than they can support.

Barring an immediate and satisfactory resolution of these problems, and some explanation of their sub-standard service, I advise you to avoid 1and1.com hosting services.

Please send me your recommendations for web hosting services that provide MS IIS hosting services (I have a few small ASP programs on the site) and a large monthly bandwidth allocation (I current have 25 GB/month). Podcasting is a tremendous user of bandwidth. Please leave your recommendation ass comments to this post, so that others can benefit from your experience, as well. I would also like to hear about your experiences, good and bad, with 1and1.com hosting or any methods that might assist me in resolving my problems.