I feel like an idiot. I was sucked in by the cheap monthly fees and its was a HUGE mistake. 1&1 is either a scam or they are the worst service provider I have ever seen. I cancelled my renewall a week before it was due by email and even followed up by phone to confirm. Weeks later I started getting emails and finally someone agreed that it should have been cancelled. Now months later after not hearing from them I am getting collection calls and letters. I am emailing 1&1 and and I get boilerplate answers saying I didn't reply so the froze my account so I would contact them and then sent me to collections. First of all no one EVER tried to contact me and secondly, what account!!! I freakin cancelled it! Thats the whole point. This is what you get with 1&1 and it is mind knumbing. I dont care how little money you have to spend...1&1 is not a company to deal with. Run as fast as you can! I could go on and on but I've wasted enough of my time on these idiots.

I have been with 1&1 for just under 10 years, and still they treat me like a disposable customer. Mostly my own lazyness has kept me with them, since transferring everything to a new host takes time and effort (both of which I am thin on). Today was the straw that broke the camels back. The only way to make payments to them is through an auto-billing system, and it only makes one attempt to charge a card. If it fails, they wait 3 months to shut you off without a word. In order to make a payment with a different card, you have to update your card in this system.

I am in the process of negotiating about $12, 000 in sales with assorted buyers via e-mail. I wake up today, and poof! No email. Start troubleshooting locally, and several hours later (between all my other responsiblities) I find that my account has been disabled. In a mad dash, I call in and instead of taking a phone payment, they advise me to update my auto-billing information. I do so, and an hour later…no change. My account is still disabled. I call in, and am informed to wait a few more hours, since it takes time to go through the system. Three hours later…still nothing. Now it is 8:00 PM. I call in once more, and am told that I have to wait until tomorrow since the billing department has to unlock my account. By tomorrow, I will be 36 hours without access to my email or website. Can you imagine some place like Amazon or iTunes shutting down for 36 hours because of a credit card mixup? How would that look on their image. I have this every time my credit card expires.

Even the electric company will give you a couple extra notices before they shut you down, and you have to be hundreds of dollars behind for that, not $30. I have lost an entire day of business because of their poor business practices and idiots on the phone, not to mention the potential loss of sales (I will have to examine the fallout tomorrow), use of minutes on my cell phone, downtime for my website, not to mention the frustration and absolute rage they have put me through today. The worst part was, when I threatened to leave, the idiot phone drone acted like they did not care. They all but said “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

I cannot begin to say enough bad about this 1&1, from their poor product to their awful online instructions to their unbelievably incompetent tech help. Seriously, all I needed was to set up a simple domain, forward it and set up one email account and it took 5-7 calls, and close to 2 MONTHS! The tech people, who literally speak as though they're in 4th grade, gave me exact wrong information, which I questioned at the time, but they assured me it was correct. In both instances, they were in fact wrong. And I am talking basic computer maneuvers. I cannot wait to dump them, and go back to Go Daddy.