1&1 Advertising Heavily

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen quite a few television spots for 1&1 on different channels and at various hours, which likely means the company is spending a lot of money on advertising.  I had heard of 1&1 before, but I don’t know a whole lot about the company, aside from knowing about it’s domain registration division.

The Pennsylvania-based company is a domain registrar and web hosting company, although it seems to be promoting it’s website building tools for small businesses. I suppose once a business builds a website, it’s more likely they will become long term customers. There’s certainly more money in web hosting than in domain registrations.

I did some research to see how 1&1 ranks in terms of number of domain registrations, but I didn’t see the company listed on  WebHosting.info’s top registrar list. Research led me to the 1&1 FAQ page that stated, “Schlund + Partner registers domain names for 1&1 Internet.” WebHosting.info ranks Schlund + Partner as the 5th largest domain registrar in the world, with just under 5.2 million registrations, although I don’t know if they exclusively work with 1&1 (Schlund.de forwards to 1und1.de though.

A bit more research showed me that 1&1 is related to Sedo. Both companies are owned by a German company named United Internet AG. You can see the affiliation on  Sedo’s website  and also on  1&1’s history page. United Internet AG also operates Mail.com. You can read about United Internet’s other brands on its  corporate website.

One thing I was disappointed about given the relationship between 1&1 and Sedo was what seems to be a lack of a relationship between the two companies when searching for domain names at 1&1. When I performed a domain search using a domain name I own and have listed for sale at Sedo, there was nothing that indicated that I could visit Sedo to make an offer for the domain name. Perhaps 1&1 caters only to companies that will quickly buy unregistered domain names instead of having to wait out a negotiation process.

I am sure they’ve considered this, and it would be interesting to know why these sister companies aren’t working together in a more obvious way.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

16 COMMENTS

  1. 1and1 is very good for me.Telephone support is quick and friendly.

    Facilites are way below average, however they’re catering for the less advanced user.

    Ease of moving domains was, before they introuced DNS control, virtually non-existant.

    Network speeds were….not good. Less than 6mbit/sec at times, whereas with ThePlanet I’ve peaked at 52mbit/sec.

    Pricing – very good.

    So overall – excellent for the casual user, but useless for anyone who’d want to resell – but that’s not really their market anyway.

    Thanks for great article.

    Best regards,
    Lev

  2. *

    Horror stories abound about this registrar.

    Just go to Namepros, and you’ll see how this company engages in predatory billing, charging for phantom domains (long transferred out), and using collection agencies for $10.00 domains.

    Also, a lot of complaints about their control panel and lousy support.

    Before using any registrar (or any company, for that matter), do your research. A complaint or two is not necessarily a deal breaker, but when complaints are consistent and heated, then one should heed them.

    *

  3. Back in the days, I had a few domains that I later transferred out of 1&1. Their system kept billing me for renewals. Had to contact them for each instance to get it cleared out.

  4. Nothing but problem with 1&1, predatory billing for non
    existent names, terrible support and their entire system
    is unnecessarily complicated.

    GoDaddy works just fine for me.

  5. 1 and 1 is a bunch of jokers.
    They put a collection agency on me for a $50 debt when I had CANCELLED the service prior to any balance owing!
    Their phone support is relatively friendly, though they weren’t giving me an easy time about giving a written declaration that they forgive the debt and will make no further attempt to collect it.
    My advice to anybody readint this would be to STAY AWAY from 1 and 1, without exception.
    For domains, I pick godaddy and moniker, and for hosting, hostgator all the way.
    1 and 1 really hasn’t a clue what they’re doing.

  6. Only heard bad things about 1&1. They also have been advertising heavily in magazines for years, for example multi-page spreads in INC magazine.

  7. In Germany everyone knows 1&1. They’re a big ISP and the reason why their Domain registration rates are high is simply cause they offer 1year free Domain registration to each customer.

    United Internet AG also owns Germany’s most favored Domain Registrar: United-Domains! Probably Europe’s real deal in terms of .TLD variety. And the biggest .eu registration holder, even pre launch.

    About the 1&1 ISP services though. Their support is really lacky but their systems work properly. One of the biggest competitors to Deutsche Telekom (or as known to you with their mobile subsidiary T-Mobile USA).

  8. Agree with Ms Domainer and Alan, 1and1 sucks, they make it very difficult to cancel services and then use collection agencies to get few dollars out of you.

  9. Great to see you’re interested in 1&1, Elliot. Just to give you some more insight: Schlund + Partner used to be a 100% B2B subsidiary of 1&1 in Germany but was merged with 1&1 in the end of 2006. As Schlund also handled the domain registration for our company, this name still pops up in many domain statistics. I can’t give you the exact figure, but we have registered far above 10 million domains for our customers. The webhosting.info statistics lack millions of ccTLDs which are particularly important in Europe.

    As you stated, both 1&1 and Sedo (and as TD and Peter stated also United Domains and InerNetX) are subsidiaries of United Internet, a public company in Germany. Although we collaborate in some areas, all these brands are run independently.

    One notable difference to the incumbent companies we brought with us when we entered the US market in 2004 was the combination of domain registration and hosting packages that led to 1&1’s success in Europe.

    To everybody who expressed bad experiences in the comments: We are very sorry to hear that and I invite you to contact our customer service team on Facebook or visit our customer forum.

    Andreas Maurer, Head of Social Media Communication, 1&1 Internet

  10. There are so many reasons to avoid 1and1 but here’s the little known Number 1 reason to avoid using 1and1 to register domain names:

    1and1 does not register domains in real time.

    And they Do Not tell you that anywhere.

    You go through and complete the registration process believing you just got your domain.

    Then you find out someone else registered it a day or two later.

    That happened to me several times before I realized the reason.

    I had foolishly responded to their low domain price offers.

    It seems 1and1 aggregates domain orders then submits them to Schlund.de.

    When I emailed 1and1 Customer Service about that problem and asked why customers aren’t informed of the registration delay, I received a snide response that essentially said, “That’s the way it is and there’s nothing we can do about it”.

    It doesn’t matter if registration costs are low or the domain is offered for free if someone else can grab it after you thought you did.

  11. I agree with the comments above about their billing practices..they make it very very difficult to cancel / transfer domain names out. Even if you transfer a domain out, you have to cancel each domain manually using their antiquated system to avoid future billing. Billing is opaque (i.e. you get a charge for $25 for example but its hard to reconcile that back to which products or domains you are being billed for). Worst of all, this company knows it and has institutionalized these practices.

  12. 1&1 is very difficult to work with. I would say customer service is easy to reach, but due to the poor english and the fact that they generally don’t know anything about the services they offer, I find it frustrating to call.

    Their systems are very odd and certainly cancelling service is made to be very difficult.

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