After almost a week of hell dealing with 1and1 – philpalmiei.com is back up.

I don’t know if it is 100% their fault, but they definitely didn’t make the situation any better. If you are contemplating using 1and1 for your domain registration – DON’T!!!

It is near impossible to work with them, and if you ever decide to transfer to another registrar, or sell a domain – good luck with that.

For some strange reason (my own fault for not reading) they do not operate like every other of the 10,000 registrars online. You do not purchase a domain name and manage it individually. You purchase domains and add them to a contract. This contract is the biggest pain in the ass to manage, and prevents you from handling the domains’ accounts directly. You do have full dns control etc. but, they will CANCEL all of your domains in that contract if you have an accounting problem like i did.

My credit card declined on a charge about 2 months ago, i logged in and updated my card info (it had expired), but because my 1and1 account has nothing to do with my contract account, they didn’t just re-run the new card on file like GoDaddy and everyone else does. They instead send me a crappy email that went straight to my spam box (because it included a shit load of ads along with the failure notice) and then proceeded to just cancel every domain in the contract.

Yes, this is a ‘venting my frustration’ post and it is purely based on my experience with them. But i will not be recommending them to anyone for anything.. go with godaddy.

Phil