http://www.1and1.com with whom I have 34 domains, many of which I have switched from http://www.GoDaddy.com does not offer clean and crisp easy access to your domain names status. That is unlike with GoDaddy you cannot easily all in one clean listing see the status and expiration dates of your domains.
In an effort to keep ongoing business and continually bang out credit card debits into eternity, 1and1.com likes to hid their auto renewal page in another website altogether and thereby intentionally complicate matters.
The site is http://www.cancel.1and1.com
Then you have to go to the top left and click “cancel” after which you click the link that says “cancel & cancel additional items”
This will finally bring you up to your domains where you can remove the “auto renewal” feature.
1and1 cleverly keeps their customers by making another website to go to in order to simply stop the auto renewal feature, then they conceal and scare customers into thinking they will be altogether cancelling the domain (when they simply want to stop the auto renewal feature).
Many lose heart and simply just leave the domain on auto renewal at this point, but if you persevere you indeed can stop the auto renewal.
A lot of trouble considering GoDaddy makes it way easy. Upon calling tech support at http://www.1and1.com about my 34 domains with them, I asked to consolidate all packages into one, but the tech was too lazy to do that for me and refused.
Neither would she cancel any of my domains. To add to the nightmare when cancelling a domain not only to you have to endure the above process at 1and1.com but you also thereafter have to click through your inbox email confirming the cancellation (that is if you even receive it).
When I had one domain transfer that didn’t go through from GoDaddy, I asked 1and1 tech support to tell me if there were any others. The lady “Sheryl” rep.3729 told me “That will take several minutes to look in each one.”
I replied, “I don’t care! I pay your company several dollars every month for domains. Do it!”
She reluctantly did so and didn’t provide very good service because she had to comply with all of 1.and1.com’s goofy policies to slow down customer cancellations and discontinuing a mere auto renewal.
Paul F Davis – international speaker, author, and consumer advocate
RevivingNations@yahoo.com
Paul F Davis - Weblog 
I have 70 domain names with 1and1.com. I have years in this business and I’ve never seen a service worse than 1and1.com.
Since I realized that 1and1.com is a big fraud, I tried to transfer all my domain names to another and better registrar but surprise! 1and1.com blocked all my attempts to transfer the domain names and now they are expiring and entering into redeption periods.
I’m working on a new website called http://www.1and1frauds.com and I kindly invite you and other people to join and tell the world how bad is 1and1.com. The website will be online in a few days. Feel free to contact me and publish my email if you want.
Cant agree any more.
Last year I was charged after falling for the auto renewal trick. I then thought I’d cancelled, but fell for the non cancellation track so was apoplectic when I received yet another invoice. In both cases the invoice was for the future ie hosting I was yet to use. Yet they still refused to back down.
Disgraceful, if you ware reading this, NEVER USE 1&1
These people make it ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO CANCEL THEIR SERVICE. HORRIBLE, FRAUD, NO COOPERATION.
I have been with 1and1.com for almost 10 years. For the last year I have had nothing but problems. I develop many sites using Joomla. The 1and1.com servers continually give an error 500 message. After consulting with Joomla, it was explain the error 500 was unknown server error caused by limitations on the SQL database. I called several times trying to talk to a supervisor to supply them with documentation on the problem and solution, but was refused access . I left several request to have a manager call me and received no responses. As a result I have had to move my customer sites to other hosting sites. The tech support response is “It’s Joomla.” Once moved they work fine.
I finally spent 3 weeks preparing my own site to move. The domain renewal was due on the 6th of April so I decided to wait until the 7th to shut this down (I had auto domain renewal). When I canceled they put the domain into redemption and shut it down. The service manager for 1and1.com acknowledged the error and said he would rectify the problem. I just got an email indicating it could take up to 5 days to resolve the problem. This has not only shut down my site, but also emails.
.com Domain Transfers still takes a VERY SLOW 5 days – I have just been informed by OneandOne. This must be the slowest in the Industry. I am a web developer of many years and TLD transfers are usually the same day in my experience. I think it’s policy rather them any manual / technical problem which is VERY POOR SERVICE in my opinion. Their CANCEL CONTRACT admin is cr*p and I too have experienced loosing domains as OneandOne deliberately scrub the DNS record and make cancellation difficult. Why? it just causes them bad PR.
When ever my new customers say they already have a domain with OneandOne I curse !!
… it is also worth noting that if your use 1and1’s web ‘wizards’ (aka. “tricksters”) such as their E-Shops, that a lot of their code, PHP variables are commented & written in German and so is harder to amend / understand if you don’t speak German… so I found it VERY FRUSTRATING trying to adapt their web shop templates. And in general the coding is sh*te and not Standard Compliant (i.e. loads or validation errors). You can tell it is written with very little quality control of code !
1 and 1 is BBB rated “F”. That says a lot.
They do not let you cancel easily. 1and1 makes it difficult to cancel and if something is wrong (as in you don’t respond to the email they didn’t send) they will still charge you and send you to debt collections.
Avoid 1and1.com like the plague!
Very shady company.
I would like to add to the comments about 1and1. There is no excuse for putting the ‘cancel’ section on a separate web site, it is simply to create as much resistance to stop you moving elsewhere.
What is worse, if you don’t cancel their service they send threatening letters. My credit card expired and 3 or 4 days later I received letter threatening court action. I updated my credit card details and was sent another threatening letter even after that. I contacted support, and asked for an apology. No apology, just simply told to ‘ignore the letter’.
I have another problem too. One of the domains is registered in a clients name, so I can’t delete that without his signature apparently. I can’t track him down, so I have to renew that domain forever it seems.
Stay away from 1and1. Never have I dealt with a more disgusting company.
Interesting observation I’d like to share. After reading the horror stories here, I decided to check up on my 1and1 domains. You see, I have over 10 new domains (mine) that I registered with 1and1 (all of them are less than a month old). I also have several more domains (customer’s) that I am babysitting. I wanted to make sure that come this time next year, if I needed to make any changes or even cancel the domains, that I would be able to do so. Since I have all this information in front of me right now, I thought I’d go check out the cancel site, and the admin site.
Well…after I started playing around the cancel site and went back and forth from the cancel to the admin site, I could no longer access the sites! When I tried to click on any page (like the account tab, or invoice link), the thing would just sit there and look like it’s really busy.
Baloney. Since I have a few tricks up my sleeve, I hit them up again with my customer’s account, but this time I hid behind my proxy, so they can’t see my IP.
Bingo. Suddenly, the site works again. Thinking this was a temporary glitch, I got back to my normal IP and tried to log back into my 1and1 account. No go.
I don’t have enough here to prove that 1and1 is actively blocking my IP and account because it felt that I was looking to cancel, given that I was switching back and forth between the admin and cancel sites, but you have to wonder why I was being slowed down to the point of being effectively blocked, while my customer account login, hidden behind a proxy when I tried, was allowed access.
At the very least, I agree with the comments here. Very shady. Feels like I’m doing business with the East German Stasi.
Rien Encore!
oh yes thanks
Oh yes. They are indeed the worst. My dns propagation on my nameservers was initiated 8DAYS ago and its still not gone through. Actually I think its the way they set up private nameservers….via ‘glue domains’. It propagated a cpl of times then reset back to the original IP’s. Plenty of calls made to their Philipines ‘Techsupport’ received only ‘ We understand sir BUT our admins are on it.’ OR ‘We understand sir but the FAQ says 7 days’ etc etc. They are as polite as they are worthless. Unfortunately I would have liked a resolution for my issue than their sympathy.
I am now trying to transfer the domain name to godaddy and they are giving me the 5 day run around. I asked them if there was anything to do to expedite the process and pleaded with them to do so. They insisted there was nothing. Then after a few searches on google i came up with cancel.1&1.com and was able to cancel and change provider there. Since I was upset they did not inform me after all my pleading, about the cancel.1&1.com option, I asked them if they were the ‘Tech Support’ dept or the ‘Point to the FAQ’ dept. To which, in true form they replied ” we are the tech support department and we are sorry’.
STAY AWAY form 1&1. Their Tech support department(based in Phillipines) tries to compensate for inability with sympathy. Similarly their ‘admins’ try to compensate ignorance with radio silence.
Awesome, I did not heard about this topic up to the present. Thanks!
They charged me for the domains that I have transferred to godaddy.com.
I sent an email to refund the money.
I was just hit by collections for their service. Stay away, my credit is ruined because of them.
They also admitted to me that there’s no manual renewal feature. If a company doesn’t have that feature, you know they’re up to no good.
Data don’t lie on BBB:
Selling Practices (65 complaints)
51 Resolved
2 Unresolved
3 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
9 Company did not respond
Advertising Issues (19 complaints)
14 Resolved
4 Unresolved
1 Company did not respond
Service Issues (130 complaints)
107 Resolved
5 Unresolved
7 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
11 Company did not respond
Customer Service Issues (3 complaints)
1 Resolved
2 Unresolved
Credit or Billing Disputes (438 complaints)
327 Resolved
37 Unresolved
15 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
59 Company did not respond
Delivery Issues (17 complaints)
16 Resolved
1 Company did not respond
Refund Practices (57 complaints)
47 Resolved
2 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
8 Company did not respond
Product Quality (19 complaints)
18 Resolved
1 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
Contract Disputes (47 complaints)
37 Resolved
1 Unresolved
3 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
6 Company did not respond
Guarantee or Warranty Issues (15 complaints)
12 Resolved
1 Company made every reasonable effort to resolve
2 Company did not respond
Repair Issues (12 complaints)
10 Resolved
2 Company did not respond
bad service on 1and1
Agree completely with everything said here on this blog.
They made every effort to keep me from canceling, then when I rejected the charges on my credit card they sent collection agency’s out for the money, as well as canceling my domain and service (so I have not even received service for the year they are trying to bill me on).
This company is a COMPLETE SCAM!
If you already have an account with them, MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO CLOSE IT ASAP!
If you were thinking of opening an account with them, THINK AGAIN!
Ditto to Paul and to each and every customer who had bad experiences with 1and1.
1and1 is the worst hosting company ever and is a complete fraud. Wondering why they still in business with that many continuous complaints and unresolved problems.
Some years back they were doing ok, lately their service is just horrible. Not only their service s*cks, their customer support is the RUDEST and WORST for any big company EVER.
Either whoever trained / brainwashed those employees is evil, or they only hired people with evil mind, who do not have any good manner as customer service.
What a waste of money.