I’ve just had a particularly frustrating experience with the hosting company, 1&1, and wanted to share, or perhaps vent. I’m allowed to vent in my own blog right? And if on the lucky chance that someone is shopping for a website hosting company and is considering 1&1 (aka 1and1), I may spare them and their website designer many frustrating phone calls, wasted time and wasted money.

All my client wanted, was two simple redirects. He wanted his website to be redirected from “http” to “https”, so that they’d see the little secure padlock immediately and make them feel secure. Logical, right? And he wanted another redirect. Because SSL certificates need to be either “yourdomain.com” or “www.yourdomain.com”, he had selected the “yourdomain.com” without the “www”. Also reasonable. And therefore he wanted his traffic redirected and the “www” removed. He wanted two redirects.

Now this sounds simple and logical, right? Apparently not for 1and1 hosting. I guess 1and1 hosting has outsourced their technical support overseas, because someone always answered and said their name was “John” or “Bill” but you knew it wasn’t. It took talking to two different people at 1and1 hosting over half an hour just to get someone to attempt to give me the .htaccess code to do these redirects.

Then, when the redirects failed to work with a simple html form (ie: action=”cart.php”) the 1&1 (1and1) hosting people said it was due to my cart. Now this took another hour and three different people at 1&1 hosting - it took that long just to get them to admit there was a problem. When I told them THEIR redirect code wasn’t working, they put me on hold for over 20 minutes, and finally came back and said no, it was my fault.

The lovely people at 1&1 hosting said that I was on my own to figure out how to do these two redirects - they would not supply me with the code. Even when I showed them, that with the redirect code that’s generated by the 1&1 hosting control panel… failed to redirect for any interior page (it worked for mydoman.com but failed for mydomain.com/contact.php)…1&1 hosting maintained that it was my shopping cart code that was my problem.
Frustrated beyond belief, I contacted DreamHost, my hosting company. They promptly send me an article in their Wikipedia on how to do redirects and that article recommended I visit AskApache.com that had more redirect code suggestions that were guaranteed to work with DreamHost. I prayed that they might with 1&1 also.

I picked the http to https code, copied and pasted. I picked the www to non-www code and did the same. And like magic, my client’s site worked. No thanks to 1&1 hosting!

I strongly recommend all people avoid 1&1 hosting and look elsewhere. The technical support people are rude, stubborn, and simply incompetent.

Jill (who doesn’t usually rant in her blog, but needed to warn people about just how bad 1&1 - or 1and1 website hosting is…thanks for listening)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 7:54 pm and is filed under the Rants category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.