Dear 1&1,

I’ve been a loyal customer of your shared hosting service for seven years. You’ve provided me with a place to base my web-ventures & hosting experience. You gave me incremental upgrades to my account free of charge for years, and for the better part of the seven years I’ve used your services I’ve been fairly pleased. Despite the warnings and the sob-stories I’ve heard from other people using your service, I decided to trust you because of your track record with my account.

• I can put up with your mediocre technical support.
• I can put up with your $0.12/mo. price increase on my package.
• I can put up with your crummy control panel.
• I can put up with your late and barely supported PHP5 implementation.
• I can put up with your reluctance to let me control my domains when associated with a site.
• I can put up with your e-mail spam.
• I can put up with your strange Data Center Location (Backwater area of Pennsylvania?)
• I can put up with your mediocre network routing to your location.
• I can put up with your crappy billing department hours.

What I cannot put up with, is you adding services to my account, charging me for them, and not even bothering to notify me. You don’t get to charge me for services I did not ask for; you don’t get to modify my package without my knowledge. You don’t get to get away with this.

You know what else you don’t get to do?

You don’t get to host my site anymore; you don’t get to charge my credit card any more. We’re through, no more, it ends here. As of this moment I am now hosted by HostGator, a very capable hosting company from Texas. I will no longer have ties to 1&1 Hosting, they’ve lost a longtime loyal customer over some very stupid business practices & shady dealings. I’ve filed a complaint with the BBB, transferred my domains, and moved on. It is my hope that 1&1 Internet falls victim to the repercussions of practicing bad ethics and is forced to shut down so nobody else will have problems like I have.