Saturday 15 October 2011

Limbo (or, why 1&1 equals nothing)

My new website is finished and ready to roll and I have written a suitably dull post to kick things off. But I can't direct you to it yet because I'm still waiting for my domain name transfer to go through. I registered grahamnunn.net with 1&1 because at the time I was pissed off with 123-reg. I can't remember why. Now I feel completely the opposite - 123-reg have picked up their game. Their implementation of Wordpress is a dream. Everything is great with them. We hold hands sometimes and plait each other's hair. We enjoy the best days.

The transfer appears to have gone through - 123-reg are telling me that they now control the domain and I can do what I want with it, but this isn't true because the forwarding I set up with 1&1 (to redirect to this blog) is still in effect. I can't log on to Wordpress because I just get a Blogger 'page does not exist' error.

1&1 are crap. If you try to do anything at all, they give you seven different ways of doing it, all of which conflict with each other and none of which actually work. I've tried cancelling my entire contract with them (they still host the never viewed doormatpicnic.com) but after further conflicting advice, I just get a 404 error when I try to confirm the decision. For professional web hosts, their website is a shocking shower of shit. To achieve anything on the site, or rather attempt to, you have to Google it first because finding the answers on the site itself is next to impossible. It's like they want to exasperate the user into sticking with them. Yeah, way to go. Don't they realise that I have upwards of zero people waiting to see my new site?

As a rational footnote, it's possible that this is not 1&1's fault. There may be other forces at work here. But they're still crap, so my ire is valid.

3 comments:

Ariane said...

And you told me to sign up with them! Graham!

Ben Park said...

I've never had hosting from 123-reg but I've had DNS/Nameserver issues with their domains too. This is a few years ago (as evidenced by my terminology/choice of words), but here's a section of correspondence with them (slightly edited/cut down).

"Regarding [withheld], it has now been nearly 4 days (in 2 hours time) since I registered this domain. Nominet says its mine, I can access everything in the control panel, theres a nice advert for 123-reg on it at the moment for anyone who might visit it - but still my web forwarding doesn't seem to be working.
I've never had a domain take this long to be usable through 123-reg before. I'm guessing at this stage that it is in fact a fault - please can you look into it for me?"

No reply, nor to the second message. Excerpt from third message:

"Assuming for one moment that someone might be reading these, as no-one has replied to any of my support requests so far, I wonder if anyone would like to look into it for me. And even if you wouldn't like to, I would be grateful if you could. Thanks"

Still keeping my cool:

"Last Monday (24th April), I registered [domain]. According to Nominet it is in my name, you have taken the money for it from my credit card and it shows up in my 123-reg account. Unfortunately this is where the story ends, as setting it to forward to my chosen place of webspace does not work. It hasn't worked at all since I registered it, and despite contacting your support department three times via emails, I have not even received an acknowledgement that anyone is looking into it. I have received support tickets to say it was received, but no human has contacted me to let me know what is going on and why it is that a 72 hour domain registration has taken 1.5 weeks and still seemingly isn't finished.

I am not happy with this level of non-service."

Cracking up:

"Realising this may take some time for you to reply (if at all), and I am an impatient person after two weeks of waiting for a domain name to work, I have decided to have a go at fixing it myself.

Maybe I'll get lucky at fixing my own problem here. If this works, perhaps 123-reg would like to consider forwarding on other users'
emails onto me that they can't be bothered to reply to, to see if I can help with their problems?

As always, if anyone from 123-reg would like to contact me, I am more than willing to converse with you."

Completely losing it:

"I hate to be a stickler for tradition and everything, and I am aware that you are experiencing yet another fault on whatever 386 with 16mb of ram is at the centre of your business, and I am aware that this new problem is related to web forwarding , but I have to ask the question.

How exactly did - which took ME nearly two weeks to put the correct settings into your website MYSELF to get my own domain to work, now get updated behind the scenes to go to the BNI business referral network?

I just can't see how that happens.
I know you're the cheapest company in the world, but my time is worth more than that. I don't have time to come online daily and check if my web forwarding is working or if you've forwarded one of my domains to go to some porn site or the personal homepage of a 6yr old from Texas. Given you won't give me full access to look after my own domains, I don't have any choice but to rely on the fact that you are supposed to know what you're doing.

Oh and look at that. I update web forwarding back to what it already says it is, and it works again. Either its just a coincidence, or I really am fixing my own problem. I know you won't, but there is no need to reply to this email, as it seems to be working again. Maybe it'll hold up for the rest of the hour."

Graham said...

Ariane - I'm sorry! At that time, though, they seemed to be the better option.

Ben - Yes, that kind of experience is probably what made me go off them in the first place, but I have to say that they've responded very quickly to all my recent enquiries and their packages have improved also.