1&1.. doesn’t suck?
Two days ago, I was fiddling around with the FlashStuf database when I made one wrong change that cut off the last half of every news article. It also turned out that I did the last backup of my database in May, leaving 15 articles severed even after I restored what I did. I was hoping I could get a backup from the previous day sent to me without having to make a call to tech support (the horror stories were enough to make it my last resort, especially someone having to wait 5 days just to get the wrong database backup).
Nevertheless, I ended up calling them at 6 PM and requesting to have a backup from the previous day sent to me. I told them which database and from what day, and since they could use “as much information as possible,” I told them I’d like the backup from 6 PM the day before.
Now I wasn’t expecting much. I could live with 15 or so broken articles and eventually copy over the text when the Wayback Machine got to it 6 months down the road. At the end of my conversation with tech support, the guy even told me “we’ll try to get that to you soon,” and made damn sure I got the idea. But to my pleasant surprise, I received an email today with the location of my backup (uploaded to the root of my server), which had all the previous articles in-tact.
So maybe they’re not all bad. Again, as with most people, I had never had a problem with 1&1 because I never had to deal with their tech support. And the one time I had to, they were responsive and got done what I needed to be done. Maybe it was a fluke and I was just lucky to have someone who knew what they were doing on the line, but either way they’re keeping my business. And when I can get that good of support for $4/month, well I think I’m getting a pretty damn good deal.
