1&1

Author: Jenna Vasquez

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The Good

• Great features
• High quality data center

Services Offered

1&1 offers economical prices, lower than most found in the industry. Because 1&1 makes starting a business easy for a private individual or a small business, many companies can easily overcome the high cost of developing a website. 1&1's features allows users to easily do the following:

• Create a website easily that is editable at any time as a live website
• Designs, materials, and pre-made text for any industry
• Marketing tools and SEO materials to attract new customers

Hundreds of pre-made website templates help users customize their website towards the customer's industry. 1&1 also offers smartphone and tablet optimization with mobile device compatibility. A user can also change the color scheme of the website to match their company's logos and colors.

Data Center

1&1's U.S. Data Center, found in Lenexa, KS, has 44,000 servers in five rooms consisting of 55,000 square feet. The center has 300 Gbps with multiple network redundancy. The data center has a reputation of being state-of-the-art to handle 1&1's over 19 million websites. Top-notch fire suppression, three chilling plants, and five 16-cylinder diesel backup systems ensure days of power in the event of a power failure. A testing lab maintains the 40,000 servers when they are being serviced, and a 24/7 security force makes it easy to ensure the security of the data summer. The Internet backbone consists of two external service providers, somewhat low compared to the eight providers found throughout many companies in the industry. The data center does, however, reinforce its backbone with a 300 Gbps connection via fiber to its outside providers.

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The Bad

• Customer support quality
• No VPS hosting options
• No dedicated hosting options

Customer Support Quality

The customer support service at 1&1 leaves something to be desired. Customers found extensive wait time and that their customer service representative often couldn't answer their questions. Customer service representatives tend to avoid questions regarding domain registration and cancellation, and instead direct customers back to the company terms of service page. This is particularly disconcerting, as many other customers reported issues with cancellation, and even losing domain names. Some customers on review sites reported tickets that were never answered. Recently, 1&1 has begun working on these issues, and no longer sends customers to cancellations for domain non-payments. Still, be aware that this has been a problem in the past.

No VPS or Dedicated Hosting

1&1 offers some web hosting options, however they could offer more. We would like to see 1&1 extend their services to include VPS and dedicated web hosting options. This provides more options and customization for customers who would benefit more from plans that included VPS and dedicated hosting options.

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The Bottom Line

1&1 offers some great features, a high quality data center, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. However, we are concerned with the quality of their customer support and their limited hosting options. While 1&1 may have some good qualities, overall we think there are better choices out there.