GoDaddy Vs. 1and1: Customer Support Review

The is the fifth round of our comparison between two of the most popular web hosts in the industry, GoDaddy and 1and1. This time we’ll be comparing how each hosts perform in terms of customer support.

In my opinion, the importance of customer support is determined by the nature of your website. If you’re running an online business and making sales everyday, you just can’t afford to have your website go down for more than a couple of minutes once in a while.

On the other hand, if you’re going to host your family photo album, you may not want to pay more for better customer support.

Let’s see how both web hosting companies compare in terms of customer support.

GoDaddy Customer Support Review

Despite some negative reviews I’ve read on GoDaddy here and there, I have to say that I’ve been honestly surprised and satisfied with their support so far. I have been a GoDaddy customer for only 3 months or so and I have to say that they are very conscious of the service they’re delivering.

Let me explain.

When I first signed up to GoDaddy, I’ve had an issue with my domain name. I called GoDaddy’s support center and been answered within a couple of minutes. I am an experienced webmaster so of course I was able to challenge a little.

Within a few minutes, the technician was able to solve my problem in a very professional way. Half an hour later I get a phone call from GoDaddy. They wanted to know if I was satisfied with my new hosting account and if the support I’ve received was adequate.

I mean how many web hosting company calls you back to make sure you’re satisfied with their services?

To my experience, this is the first time.

Later I’ve experiencing some problems with some PHP settings (see this post here). This time I wanted to see if their online ticket system was as fast as their phone support. About 45 minutes later I’ve had a reply from GoDaddy.

Not bad considering it’s not phone support.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve published a post on several web hosts uptime. Out of 5 web hosts, GoDaddy’s had the most downtimes. Guess what? Later that day I get home and I see that a GoDaddy network architect tried to contact me. I’ve finally got a message in my mailbox: they were curious to know how I performed the tests and wanted to have the log files so that they could look into it.

Since then, their uptime has been comparable to other web hosts (99% uptime).

If I had one negative comment about their customer support service is that they do not have a toll free number. Other than that, I am very please with GoDaddy’s support.

1and1 Customer Support Review

Heading over to 1and1.com, I just can’t find any “Support” link. It’s not that they do not provide any form of support but there’s simply no support link there. Finally I log into my account to see if there’s any support related information there.

Five minutes later, I finally find a “Help & Contact” link in my account’s control panel (glad I was on my home computer and had my 1and1 customer number handy!).

The Help link brings you to some sort of useless FAQ that shows a handful of categories. Why do I say it’s useless? Because I know from my experience that the average customer has no idea about the nature of their website’s problem. So how could they choose the appropriate category?

Anyway I finally found a 24/7 toll free number. That’s a plus for 1and1′s support.

There’s also a contact form but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of ticket system available. Maybe there’s one but if I have to spend 10 minutes to find it, I’d rather pickup the phone and call.

1and1′s customer support is provided by a call center they own in the Philippines. Their technician are trained only on first level basic issues. That says a lot to me.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview made with Joshua, the online Marketing Director at 1and1:

As to the Phillipines support question, we own the call center – it is not outsourced to a 3rd party (like some companies do.) They are trained, but only in 1st level basic suport issues -which are by far the most common. There is a convenience of the timezone which allows us better coverage for both US (west coast) and international customers.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

So there is a convenience of the timezone for better overage for both US and international customers, right? Or is it because of cheap labor maybe? Don’t tell me there’s nobody willing to work at night in the US!

Although I haven’t need to call 1&1′s support, I gotta admit that there really are many negative comments regarding 1and1′s support.

Having been working in a support center myself for over 8 years as a level 3 technician, I do know that the customers who complain the most are usually those who just can’t understand that the real problem is sitting between the chair and the keyboard.

Sorry but that’s the truth.

But still, this doesn’t explain why 1and1 has so many negative comments on popular web hosting forums.

1and1 Vs GoDaddy Customer Support – Conclusion

Customer support is very important in my opinion because not only you can encounter technical problems. You can also encounter billing problems, security problems and stuff like that. In this case it’s really important to have good support from your web hosting company.

So if customer is important for you, GoDaddy is a better choice than 1and1.

External Links

• GoDaddy Website
• 1and1 Website