1&1 Fucked up My Flow
I had a good week’s worth of posts planned out, that is until 1&1 decided to crap out on me. On Tuesday afternoon around 1pm my site returned a 404 in three different languages. This love error was displayed to the world for the following two hours. All the while, I was calling their 1-800 “expert technical support” help line to find out WTF was up. Not once did I even get put in a queue. For the most part, I would hear an obnoxious beep followed by “We’re sorry, all of our circuits are busy right now. Please calling back later.” Do you realize how infuriating that is when your site is offline and you can’t even be queued for support? I know their email support is completely useless as I’ve waited over 2 weeks for a reply on a message marked “critical”, but I fired one off anyway So, I’m sitting here staring at this 404 that just magically appeared with no answer as to why I’m seeing it and no idea how long until it will be fixed.
When it finally came back up, the performance was spotty and it was timing out every few clicks. After about an hour, it went offline again. This time for approximately an hour and a half. That was the final straw for this guy. I contacted Media Temple and told them what was happening and asked if I could get setup with the 9rules partnership program. Less than 20 minutes later I heard back from Jason who welcomed me to Media Temple with the partnership package. As soon as my account was ready (which was about 10 minutes), I started moving my site over. Not how I wanted to spend my evening, to say the least. But now I know I’m in good hands at Media Temple and I’m kicking myself for putting off moving to them for so long. I had planned to move when their new Shared-Server 6 packages are released, but I simply wasn’t going to just sit here and do nothing while 1&1 sits there and does nothing.
Man, I tell ya. I’ve had no luck with hosting. Let’s hope my days of down-time and waiting for days on end for a reply from tech support “experts’ is over. Oh, I actually heard back from 1&1 only 2 days after the incident. That’s a record for them! Not that they were much help. though…
We apologize for the inconvenience.
We encountered some technical problems on our servers. Everything is
working fine now. Please check websites again.
To which I replied…
Nice to hear from you… two days late, though. I’ve already moved my site to Media Temple as I can’t afford this kind of down time and your support response time is completely ridiculous – especially in critical situations such as this. I realize you’re one of the cheapest hosting providers around, but it’s just not worth it.
Now that I’m back online and don’t have to worry about random 404s showing up instead of my site, my series of E3 wrap-up posts will continue… tomorrow. 😛