I’ve worked with three different web hosting providers now. The latest is 1and1.com . A (now) client contacted me after already arranging hosting with 1and1 . They needed a website completed for their small business. I hadn’t worked with 1and1 before, but it seemed simple enough from the information the client provided. Here’s what’s happened so far.

I got the information to signin to the 1and1 control panel from the client and found the needed FTP information. After getting a basic site together and ftp’ing the files to the 1and1 hosting site,  I let them know it was ready. As is usually the case, there were some changes that needed to be made. At this point, it’s two days after hosting was setup with 1and1. I attempted to FTP back to the site to upload the changed website files, but got the error that the password was bad. Odd, since it had worked the day prior, but I tried it twice more and it still wouldn;t connect.

I logged back into the 1and1 control panel and changed the FTP password, thinking it might be messed up. The new password(which for some reason 1and1 said might take 30min to take effect, what’s up with that?) didn’t work either. An hour later, I called 1and1’s support and was told, they knew about the problem and were working to resolve it. Eight hours after that I called back since it still wasn’t working. They had no ETA, and I was told basically to wait until it was fixed. The third day of their hosting contract with 1and1 and my client had an outage over 8 hours long!

With this experience, I can’t recommend 1and1 hosting to anyone else that may be desiring reliable website hosting and design. Your mileage may vary.