I had a simple problem, I am unable to issue INSERT commands to my DB. This should be a simple verification of the users’ db permissions. I called support and instead of the technician ensuring that he fully understood the problem, he merely asked for the url I was having trouble with. Upon furnishing it to him, he put me on hold to diagnose the problem, something I could have saved him the trouble of doing. The problem was then escalated to a higher level where I was told the problem was in my code, of which I had already verified that it wasn’t.

I emailed the support tech back to show him the results of my testing via scripting, phpMyAdmin, and command line MySQL tools further proving it is a permissions issue. It has now been over 2 hours since that email was sent. What was a minor problem has now taken portions of my site completely offline for the entire day.

Having previously worked on a support team for Rackspace Managed Hosting, I can tell you that this is not the way to treat customers should you wish to keep them. I understand that $10/month does not entitle me to immediate issue resolution and top of the line technical expertise, but it should at least entitle me to great customer support.

A minor issue that could have been resolved quickly now has me reconsidering my long term relationship with 1&1. Consider for a moment if this were to happen to 500 or 1000 of your $10/month customers.

Above is the comment I just left for 1&1 regarding an issue that has taken down the forums for The Cover Project. The issue is still unresolved at the present time.

2/7/2007 9:46am – Still no response from 1&1 on the problem. I dropped their support line another email regarding the ticket at 8:30 this morning. Let’s see if that one gets a reply.

2/7/2007 3:30pm – After giving up all hope regarding 1&1 support helping me out on this one I decided to fix the issue myself. I dumped the existing db and imported the data into a new db. When I did this I found out that the SMF Forum software I use had generated a massive error log about 150MB in size which far exceeded the 100MB limit on MySQL dbs in a 1&1 shared environment thus dropping the db into read only mode. These errors had to be generated almost instantly in order for the db to exceed 100MB. I cleared out the offending records and it still took the old db a few hours to realize it wasn’t over capacity. In the end, the support staff should have gone “what makes one of our dbs go into read only mode? Oh yes, exceeding your capacity.” Realizing these people are no better than trained monkeys, I am going to move to Surpass Hosting sometime in the future.