1and1 Has the Worst Support Ever. Migrate Now.

I’ve been helping a client migrate servers to consolidate resources. Most of his domains were registered at 1and1. We simply had to update DNS settings, or so we thought. Once we had migrated the sites, we logged into 1and1 to change the DNS settings. That’s when the most epic of problems began.
First, every registrar says it can take up to 24 hours to propagate, but I haven’t experienced propagation times beyond 30 minutes in years. Well, 1and1 lives up to that spec. They actually do take 24 hours or more to change. This caused some simple migrations to drag out into days.
The next day we awoke to find the next big problem.

There is a domain registration error in the DNS.

Fantastic. We reviewed our entries, but it looked good. We clicked the “Check DNS entries” and it displayed the old DNS entries, not the new ones that took 24 hours to propagate, the old ones. We double checked our new entries again, and they looked great. So, I called their support line. After a few ridiculous questions, they claimed it had to be escalated to their DNS support team. Can you guess what the expected response time was? 24 hours. Everything at 1and1 takes 24 hours apparently. Sure enough, 24 hours later, I get an email on Sep 25 at 10:10 am claiming,

Thank you for contacting us.

xxx.com is pointing to an IP address x.x.x.x. You have to
create the subdomain to where the parent domain is pointing.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

—
Sincerely,
Lara Gatchalian
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Hmm, that’s interesting, I didn’t even ask about that domain, its the new domain with subdomains as nameservers specifically specified in 1and1. So I respond saying to look at my settings in the system, they are good. They responded 24 hours later at Sep 26 on 10:17 am saying:

Thank you for contacting us.

Your subdomains are not set to the parent domain so the IP hasn’t updated. Once you fix this, you should be able to update the domains.

Thank you.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

—
Sincerely,
Shireen
Transfers Department
1&1 Internet Inc.

At this point you should know that there is no published way to set a parent domain. WTF is that? So I responded. This time I never received a response. Not 24 hours later… NEVER. 24 hours later, I submitted 2 other tickets, who’s response 24 hours later was equally useless. My final support request went this way:

Hello,
I’ve submitted several support tickets. For each ticket, I’ve received poor service and no actual solution. I’ve listed the tickets below your convenience below.

C383xxxxxx
C382xxxxxx
C38xxxxxx

My account number is xxxxxxxx.

I have several domains with DNS errors, including
*.xxx.com (3 subdomains on this domain)
xxx.com
xxx.com
xxx.com
xxx.net
xxx.com

They should all point to my nameservers which are on IP:
dns1.xxx.com x.x.x.x
dns2.xxx.com x.x.x.x

I’ve checked that these resolve to the correct IP. The only problem I can imagine is that your systems are not correct. Everything else looks good everywhere but within 1and1. Please help me correct this problem. If I don’t get this resolved with this ticket, we will be forced to migrate away from 1and1 to a registrar who is willing to support their customers.

Some of these sites were hosted on rackspace with stabletransit.com name servers. These are now incorrect and stale. They only place they would indicate this is on your systems. Please correct this.

Thank you,
Eric

Precisely 24 hours later, I received a response.

Thank you for contacting us.

We have escalated the case to our Administrators to fix the issue that you have on your domain names. You will received an email from them once they have process it.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

—
Sincerely,
Jun Marie Ann Sabello
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

That was 36 hours ago. I’m not holding my breath. I don’t expect these seemingly incompetent people to figure it out. I’ve punted and begun migrating my client’s domains to NameCheap.com. I strongly recommend AGAINST using 1and1. Its frustration not worth anything in the world. Move away. Use NameCheap, use NameSilo. Use just about ANYTHING other than 1and1.

UPDATE: I did receive an email, it was from 1and1’s marketing team asking me to refer a Friend for a double commission. #overmydeadbody