1and1's dedicated servers go titsup

Vulture Central received a flurry of complaints yesterday from annoyed customers of large Germany-based hosting firm 1&1 Internet. Its dedicated servers had gone fully titsup, and calls to the firm's support lines were getting either an engaged tone or no answer. Here's 1&1's side of the story: A very small number of 1&1 …

[Chris Miller]

[sic]?

"We can confirm that all affected [sic] dedicated servers are now restored to regular performance."

I can't see what's wrong with this sentence. It appears that the Germans can write better English than the Reg and understand the difference between 'effect' and 'affect'.

[Anonymous Coward]

[sic]

What is wrong with 'affected'?

Servers would indeed be 'affected' (affect; v - to influence, effect a change on) and not 'effected' (effect; v - to accomplish).

Reg hacks should go back and do their English GCSEs again methinks.

[Sceptical Bastard]

Speak as you find

I administer several websites (for clients) hosted by 1&1 (Linux-hosted 'Business' packages for about a tenner a month).

Over the past three years, we've only been offline a couple of times due to server problems, each time for an hour or so. Storage and bandwidth are adequate for the price; so far we've suffered no security issues; the email gets through; CGI and Perl scripts have largely been OK. However, 1&1's add-ons and tools are pretty basic, the admin pages on 1&1's site are slow and clunky, and the webmail app is slow.

But given that 1&1 is a non-specialist, mid-market, mid-price mass-market service, we're reasonably satisfied.

[Anonymous Coward]

sic?

they spelt "affected" correctly in that context. I think you need to take a grammar course...

[Chris Williams]

To the grammararians

The statement 1&1 originally sent said "effected". The story had already been filed with the "effected [sic]" when they asked for the verb to be corrected to save their blushes.

Being a reasonable sort of fellow, I complied, but in end-of-day haste neglected to delete the "[sic]". I will do so immediately.

But now I'm the one who looks illiterate. That's what I get for being a nice guy.

Chris Williams

El Reg

[Edward Pearson]

Title

"are now restored to regular"

"have now been restored to regular" would be a lot better.

Also, El Reg has to have the worst membership functions I have ever seen. I don't want to have to login every time I comment on a story, I have a long e-mail address.

[Steven]

Awww

Awwww poor Chris, have a biscuit :)

[Adam]

My dedicated server was down

My server has problems, but strangely only the additional ip addresses didn't work.

This is probably the first bit of downtime on this server in the last year. 1&1 reliability and value is fantastic.

[John Bayly]

And they had some serious network issues on Monday too

For a few hours on Monday, 30% of pings to my server were being dropped. I thought it was my server until I found that pinging www.1and1.co.uk only had a 30% success rate too.

The support monkey kept telling me to reboot my server, but couldn't explain to me how that would fix their web server. It was only when I told him their network was shagged (verbatim, much to the amusement of the people in my office) that he thought that I might be serious.

Throughout the the last two days status.1and1.co.uk said "All systems functional". Like fuck they were.

I'm now going to set up a script to check the page every 10 minutes and email me when it doesn't say "All systems functional". I may even start a sweepstake on when I get the email.

To be fair though, they're pretty cheap for a dedicated server, and the uptime has been pretty good up to this point, so I suppose you get what you pay for. <sigh>

[Damien Jorgensen]

1and1

We have 3 servers with 1and1. The technical support is crap, the hardware is cheap but the price is rock bottom.

Great if you want to offload something like Images from a decent hosting outfit.

Why would anyone use 1and1 for anything which you need to rely on? lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: To the grammararians

Well Chris, that's what happens when you don't re-read your story after correcting it. :-)

But, as a fellow journo, let's just say that you are doing a much better job than the folks at the Beeb... their articles are occasionally get peppered with mistakes, misquotes, grammatic errors and the like, and there's no point in asking them to fix it.

Don't sweat it.

[Chris Miller]

@Chris W

No good deed ever goes unpunished!

[Chris]

That's what I get for being a nice guy.

Nah. That's what you get for being pompous enough not to fix it in the first place.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing surprises me with this company

This article has bought back bad memories of my dealings with this company.....

They don't actually seem to know what they are doing, and their international call centres just seem to add to the problem...

After cancelling my account with them I was told I needed to resubscribe to gain access to my domain names password to allow me to transfer it to another provider, what a joke.

It also took me just under a year to recieve a refund from them after sending them an email every week and recieving the same response every week!

AVOID THIS COMPANY AT ALL COSTS - THEY ARE A JOKE!

[Ru]

Re: That's what I get for being a nice guy.

> Nah. That's what you get for being pompous enough not to fix it in the first place.

Curiously, there's this thing in which statements from people and organisations are reprinted exactly as they came in most news publications, as opposed to being fixed for spelling, grammar, content, tone, etc. I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but I can't quite seem to think what it is right now...

[Senor Beavis]

@ Edward

Top tips:

1. Get a shorter email address

2. Have all your important usernames and passwords in a handy text file on your desktop, from which you can copy-and-paste to save your fat fingers from getting any typing exercise whatsoever

My heart bleeds for you

[Whosearmy]

Support engaged?

"calls to the firm's support lines were getting either an engaged tone or no answer" was not my experience. I called about 10 mins before the problem was sorted and waited for about 10 seconds to speak to someone who said they had general network problems with dedicated servers. I've used 2 servers with 1and1 for nearly three years. One has not had any problems and the other has died three times. Support has taken between 1 hour and 6 hours (nighttime) to sort. Yes there uptime and support is not wonderful but you get what you pay for.

[Nick]

Server

I've had a dedicated server with 1&1 for the last 3 years. I've found them to be fantastic - as long as there isn't a problem. In that 3 years, I've had maybe 2 hours downtime in total including one major connectivity issue which was fixed fairly promptly. However, do not expect great customer service. If you have the misfortune of needing to contact them, you're in trouble.

However, if you persist and know which numbers to call, you can actually get through to either level3 or the onsite datacentre staff. Which is handy.

So, if you know your server management well and can resolve 99% of problems yourself you're sorted. If you're a newbie needing cheap hosting, give them a wide berth.

[Anonymous Coward]

This happens all the time. Why is it news now?

I've got 2 servers with 1and1. Tech support is crap. Even the dedicated server support is now outsourced. They do not supply 24 hour support despite what they tell you. If your server goes down at 7pm and Calcutta support can't shell to it then you have to wait until 9am the next day before a tech can fix it!

They never ever admit to having any network or node issues and never follow up on support requests. They have network problems like the one in the article every so often as a matter of course. It's hardly a new experience.

I'm slowly moving my domains away from them. If it made financial sense for me I would go with Rackspace who are utterly excellent! But sadly at the minute a cheap host is required. :(

[Anonymous Coward]

I Love the comments more than the stories

I love the comments section of El Reg, I especially like the way that all the commontaters like to put people write regarding correct grammer and spelling. It seems they are more concerned about the this than the actual importance of the story, I am guessing that if a story appeared with the headline "New super technology effects the way we do business" that their would be 10 comments on the story and a hundred slagging off the bad grammer!

[Luke Wells]

all ok

I don't want to speak too soon, but our servers didn't seem to be effected by this problem, so it was not a global problem with dedicated servers, only a select few as they stated.

[Doug]

@nick

I have a couple of 1&1 servers and have been very impressed by their uptime, reliability and performance. Fortunately I have a linux guru (bless his cotton socks that probably have a penguin logo on them somewhere) who manages them otherwise i think for a server-newbie (like me) it would indeed be tricky looking after dedicated root servers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame the Astro-Droid! Blame the Astro-Droid!

after all, 1&1

R2

Ta da!

Bloody robots. Always going off on crazy adventures about a "real master".

[Anonymous Coward]

@I Love the comments more than the stories

" [ ... ] I am guessing that if a story appeared with the headline "New super technology effects the way we do business" that their would be 10 comments on the story and a hundred slagging off the bad grammer! [ ... ] "

New to the internet, are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

New type journo's like A Coward

probably makes Reg an offer they cannot refuse something like "hey I will stop posting gazillions of comments here attracting endless viewers unless you start paying me something." Brave new world

Steve

[Anonymous Coward]

My own experience

I have had two dedicated server deals from 1and1 and agree with those saying that as long as you don't need to contact them they are basically very good value.

I get fast connections, high uptime, and everything pretty much just works. But if you need them to understand something before they will do something about it, forget it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Left 1&1.

We had an account with 1&1 when we first started our business. The website designer had said what we needed. So we called 1&1 and they sold us a package which they said was suitable. It turned out it was not so we got the designer to call them and upgrade it to one which was better suited. Again it was still lacking or some of the claimed features did not work or the sales person did not know what they were selling. So we had to upgrade again! Only to be told we had to wait 90 days before we could upgrage for a second time! We canncelled our contract and during the 3 weeks of dealing with 1&1 our site was live for about 2 days! He went over to Fasthosts and have not had any real problems other than the odd glitch with our matrix stats.

I was seriously annoyed with 1&1 and would never use them again!

[Joe]

All those web hosts, eh!

Every web host has problems now and again, no company has genuine 100% uptime, 100% speed, no issues at all.

1&1 seem okay though. My experiences of them are like everyone else's - the prices and packages are good, reliability is good, but there's no customer service really (it's all done automatically, there's no point trying to contact their human masters/slaves).

By the way, to the AC who wrote the "Left 1&1." post - who on Earth *calls* a hosting company any more? Sign up online, for God's sake!