There are lots of bad web hosts out there - godaddy.com, any registrar - not to mention the legend that is featureprice.com. (I had a half dozen clients with them when they imploded.) But I have a new addition to the list of people to whom you should never give your business - 1and1.com. Here follows my first-ever complaint letter - I have been moved to unusual eloquence by their incompetence.

Dear sir or madame,

I wish to express my disappointment at the difficulty involved in transferring an external domain from one package to another with 1and1.com hosting.

My client, the New York Musical Theatre Festival, has a content-managed site that was consuming too many of its shared host's resources because of increased traffic. Your administrators moved them to an auxiliary server and gave them one month to purchase and migrate to a dedicated hosting package. We understand this; it's not fair for one user of a shared host to consume a disproportionate amount of the server's resources. We agreed with the need to migrate.

After we expressed some trepidation at the stated 24 hour downtime that went along with transferring from one package to another, the server administrators assured us that it could be done without a downtime by prepping the new site on the managed server first and then transferring the domain to it. However, after purchasing the managed server package and uploading all our files, we went to do this, and found that we still had to submit a request to have the domains 'nymf.org' and 'nmtn.org' deleted from the Business package before we could add them to the Managed Server package - and that this process would happen at some unpredictable time within 24 hours.

The New York Musical Theatre Festival is in the midst of their season, and a potentially hours-long downtime for their web and email services is the last thing they need. However, in all of my conversations with technical support, they have insisted that because the domain is registered externally we must go through the process of submitting a cancellation request for the domains and then add them to the portfolio of the managed server whenever the administrators get around to deleting it. Tech support has been adamant that they cannot be flexible about this issue, and that my client must suffer this unpredictable outage in order to move to the managed server. Now I am stuck glued to my computer screen, watching their website like a hawk to try to catch the outage as soon as it happens.

This is not an acceptable practice for a web hosting service. The DNS entries are already pointed at your nameservers, and it takes only a small configuration change to direct the domain name from one host to another. I know for a fact that you can do this, because the server administrators moved the entire website from the shared host to the auxiliary host with no downtime! But now that we have purchased the managed host, suddenly you are being inflexible. It comes down to your administrators and tech support being too lazy to accommodate the needs of their client - my client - and that laziness is making it more difficult for my client to grow into a larger package.

As a web programming contractor, I have worked with a great many hosting companies, and I can safely say that I never want to work with 1and1.com again. Given other options - and there are plenty - I would advise any and all of my clients against hosting with 1and1.com.

I sincerely hope this issue leads to an improvement in your services.

Ben Birney