1&1 Exchange Hosting – Support and Service Levels

A bit of a rant coming …

I subscribe to 1&1 exchange hosting for my corporate email.  I used to host my own exchange box but my internet connection got a little flakey once or twice, and it struck me as better to make this vital service a bit more resilient.

In the past year I’ve suffered three outages with 1&1.  Perhaps more.  Each have lasted a day or so.  On my exchange server (admittedly with only 10 or so clients on it), there was no outage at all, ever.  Other than ADSL problems; which I can’t blame on Exchange.

Is administering an Exchange box really so difficult?  Why do these things go wrong?  I guess it’s typically because some monkey has migrated a server installation incorrectly, played around with a setting for some arbitrary reason, or some similar feckless reason.

Anyway, that’s not the rant. 

I’m really peeved about the response I got from 1&1 when I telephoned them to report an error.  I asked for a time to fix service level and was given the answer ‘as soon as possible”.  This is the least helpful answer ever.  It is a meaningless palliative that is as insulting as it is condescending.  I calmly explained that I was a technology lawyer, drafted at least two SLA’s each week for the last 14 years and really did know that they could give me a better answer.  What I wanted was their internal SLA:

• when I could I reasonably expect a tech support to pick up my case,
• what time delay is the next escalation point,
• when can I expect to be reported to

I’m not asking them to prioritise me, to change their processes or the like.  I’m just asking them to manage my expectations as an adult.

But in fact, they should be able to give me a much better answer.  These guys screw up so much that they must have metrics on average time to fix for each class of problem. I’m an adult, let me have this information when I call. Don’t fob me off with pointless platitudes. Armed with this information I can then take a qualitative judgment on whether I want to leave my account with 1&1 or migrate to an alternative (which might well be a virtual server back within my control).

rant over. For the moment.