Monday, October 06, 2008

1and1 Internet Exchange Mail Server Service

We run a small (8 person) support organization which primarily operates through email. We outsourced the management of the Microsoft exchange server a few years ago to 1and1 internet. The service has been up and down but overall reasonable ....until this weekend.

This weekend. No more email. So our weekend crew calls them up, gives them our info, and is told that the server will be down for five days. What !!?!??? So, our supervisor gets into the discussion on Sunday and the 1and1 support people confirm that it'll be 5 days. So it elevates again and our CTO gets into the act. He manages to work his way up past the first level tech support people. Eventually, he's told that the server will be down for three days. Our CTO tells them this is unacceptable.

Now it's Monday afternoon and I've gotten into the act. I tried to do an end run on their tech support department and called their finance dept to see if they would, under the auspices of their contractual obligation, help us understand how they just take down a server with no prior notice. And when is the email going to be available again?

We learned this weekend that they did try to notify their customers in advance. But, since we only use them for mail service, not hosting, they might have overlooked this class of customer and could be the reason that we were not notified of the planned downtime.

BTW - we do run an entirely separate email system for backup (thru Gmail. Thanks Google) so our customers are still being take care of albeit, with a lot more effort.

I explained to their billing dept what the problem was and he said that he would pass me up to an Ian Morse. I then spent 23 minutes on hold before their system hung up on me.

Now, I'm pissed. I just rechecked with my CTO who said that what he learned this weekend is that this was a planned server upgrade. They planned for it to take "no more than 72 hours". And as far as the support people were concerned, there was no plan to tell the customers in advance that their mail servers were down.

I find 1and1 Internet and other vendors who behave like this to be hateful.

3 comments:

Alex Woodrow said...

I have had exactly the same problem, but twice in the past month and still its not working properly. However I am a hosted customer and they certainly did not bother to let me know. I am migrating my Exchange to another ISP as soon as I can get the new one set up. I have to manage our company's IT as well as doing my normal job and 1and1 services has gone to very acceptable to totally unacceptable in the matter of weeks.

Simon Grees said...

1&1 internet email service is having a problem. I think all the customers have the same problem like you. Hope it'll be fixed very soon. :)

BBat50 said...

I should add that we ditched our relationship with 1&1 internet and switched to another vendor. It costs more but since we switched, zero problems!

If you want the name of the vendor, just ask and I'll figure it out (our company has grown so that now I don't even know all of our vendors....weird....since I started the company with just me in my living room)