My experiences, complaints & reviews with www.1and1.com Domain Registration
Part I
1and1 Internet Domain Registration is a really really terrible domain registration company.
Note: their headquarters is in Germany, & their parent company is United Internet, listed at
Frankfurt stock exchange symbol UTDI.ETR ISIN DE0005089031.
Their CEO of 13 years, Andreas Gauger, has FINALLY stepped down. Did his conscious get the better of him?
In my research about 1and1.com, I couldn’t believe how many people have been ripped off. Their amounts aren’t anywhere near what 1and1.com wants me to pay for domains I no longer own, but still, there are tons of people, not counting how many haven’t complained.
Please check out the links area dedicated to www.1and1.com
My story:
I’ve been with them since either early 2006 or late 2005. I transferred ALL of my domains from Go Daddy & Blue Razor over to www.1and1.com when I realized their price was cheaper & included privatization.
While that was okay for the first few years, what I later on realized is, that they only send you ONE e-mail notice that they are going to renew, the e-mail dates are all screwed up & do not fall inline with the REAL renewal date.
If you miss that one e-mail, or you are too busy to cancel them, you are SOL.
While you may think this is normal in the domain registration industry, nothing could be further from the truth. God Daddy/Blue Razor give you around 6 e-mail notices dating all the way back to 90 days before the domain is up for renewal. Even a week before the domain’s renewal date they send you an e-mail.
1and1 has also configured their system to be that you can’t take yourself off auto renew. They did not have it like that before.
Having auto renewal on is great if you want to keep the domain, but if you don’t want to keep the domain, it’s terrible & here is why.
Let’s say you now want to cancel a domain or a few of them, 1and1.com has built their website just to make it very very difficult for you to cancel your domain.
If you only have one or a few domains, that’s fine, but I had over 300 DOMAINS. Yes, I spent thousands of dollars with 1and1.com, for 1-2 years per domain.
On their www.cancel.1and1.com site, my 300 domains came to 32 pages of domains based on their amateurish website design. Every time I wanted to cancel one or a few, I had to go through 32 pages just to get to the end because there was NO “finish” or “complete” button anywhere except on the last page of your list of domains.
I believe they make the entire process difficult (it’s soooo far away from web 2.0, we are talking it was clearly designed back in the early to mid 90′s, or designed by a terrible database designer.) on purpose so you will give up & just keep the domain with them.
With Go Daddy/Blue Razor, you just search for the domain, check the box next to the domain, & click the renew or cancel button, it’s that simple.
Another very easy way to do it with Go Daddy, is you scroll through all of your domains (you can put your entire list on one page) & you will see a flashing red word in all caps that says “RENEW”. You can’t miss it, it’s there plain as day. Then you just go into that domain, renew or cancel it, & you are done.
More details on 1and1.com purposely confuses you.
At the bottom of each of those 32 pages, you get 2 “continue” buttons, one on top of each other which is very confusing.
Why do they need two?
They don’t.
I once clicked on the bottom “continue” button by accident, & it logged me out or took me back to the first page <geeze>.
So, you have to click on the “continue” button at the bottom of each page, as I said earlier, there is no “finish” button until you get to the very end.
Once you get to your last page, they do something else very sneaky. You have one last “continue” button which you think is the end, but NO!!! they put another “continue” button on the bottom left side below the fold, so you don’t see it, while on all the other pages, it was at the bottom right of the page, so one time I thought I was done the cancellation process & I really wasn’t.
Are you done at this point? Nope, FINALLY you get to a page that has a button called “finish”.
That is THE last & final button you have to press in order to cancel.
As I mentioned earlier, they only send out that ONE e-mail & their company policy is, we are NOT RESPONSIBLE for notifying you when your domain is up for renewal. I’ve now been told this by everyone from customer service to the complaints department.
No of course they don’t want to send you out a notice. Why help the client? In my opinion, they clearly want to hide that information so you are clueless with what is going on with your domain names.
Why do you think that is?
So you don’t cancel. Then your domain name(s) renew automatically, & they make money off of you.
They aren’t really giving you a choice. They know you are busy & won’t memorize the renewal dates of every domain you own every 365 days. How could you remember the renewal date of 1 or 2 domain names, let alone 300 domain renewal dates.
Their lovely helpful response is, GO TO Whois & check your expiry date.
Like I’m REALLY going to waste my time looking up 321 domain names on Whois & keep track of everything when it’s the domain registrar’s responsibility (not to mention moral ethics) to make it easy for their clients.
And FINALLY, it appears that they renew domains early, & I’m not talking a few days here, I’m talking 30-60 days before it’s supposed to be renewed.
What a way to steal people’s money & also prevent them from canceling. Then by the time you get that one e-mail renewal notice, it’s too late, the domain has already renewed. Maybe you tried to cancel it, are now being charged for it, & they refuse to give you your money back. So in my case you don’t have access to the domain because it’s canceled, & they won’t give me my money back.
Last time when the domains didn’t cancel because of the mixup with all the buttons, the manager was nice enough to cancel them for me & return my money, but of course one of their people in the billing department screwed up & didn’t refund me everything, so I had to continue to call & make sure everything was done properly.
This time because I somehow missed canceling some domains (not sure why, as I know I wanted to cancel them), they are refusing to refund me my money, & we aren’t talking a few domains here, my bill came to $321 & I wanted to cancel & did cancel 19 domains which still allows www.1and1.com to make a lot of money off of me & the other 26 domains I wanted to renew.
What is even more stupid, & I am guessing another ploy of 1and1.com to prevent you from having a choice to cancel the domains, is that they don’t bill you until like 30 days after the renewal date.
Go Dadday renews your domain on the 366 date & bills you right away, this way you see it go through your credit cards statement, & they give you 6 days to change your mind.
With 1and1.com, by the time you get your invoice & realize you don’t want that domain, or you canceled it but it never went through, it’s already too late to do anything about it.
By & large Go Daddy is still the best registrar (except for the increase in prices), but they make everything easy for you & their tech & sales support is right here in the US, so they understand me most of the time LOL.
While I remember in the past there were times when I knew they wanted to make it hard for me to cancel my domains, they were babies compared to what 1and1.com has put me through. The amount of time I have now wasted dealing with 1and1.com far surpasses the savings I might have made off of them.
It took me 7 hours to go through my entire list, make 2 files, ones for canceling, one for transferring to Go Daddy, & then unlock them all individually, because there’s NO way to bulk transfer.
I will be moving all of my domains from them as I am allowed, since the rule is, if you just renewed or transfered your domain, you can NOT transfer a domain again for 60 days.
Over the 19 domains I didn’t want that they refuse to give me my money back for, they have now lost my business for my entire life time, AND I will NEVER refer them to any of my clients, but from what I’ve heard from others, 1and1.com doesn’t care. They think they are soooo big, that they don’t care about your small business.
About 6 months ago I did get very angry at 1and1.com for domains being renewed that I didn’t want, but because I’m usually loyal to my vendors, & we all know what a pain it is to transfer domains (remember it took me 7 hours & I’m not even done yet), I stayed with them hoping that now that I knew how NOT to get ripped off by their system, that it wouldn’t happen again.
Unfortunately as you already know, there were problems again twice now & it doesn’t take that much to convince me I have made the wrong choice & should move on to a company who really cares about me as a client.
Good luck with your domain names everyone, I hope I’ve helped educate some of you 
Michelle
