If you haven’t heard yet, one and one aka 1&1 is not a company that you want to be dealing with.  If  you’re unfortunate enough to have registered your domain name there or have hosting there, look out when you’re ready to make a change.I deal   with setting up hosting for clients weekly and sometimes multiple times per week.  With a quality company this is no problem.  You set up a hosting account, make some configurations at the registrar (that’s what 1&1 is) , and within minutes, never more than 30 you’re able to access your site through the 3rd party hosting account.    Not so with one and one.  Here’s what you get with one and one.  It may be a little difficult to read the writing on this page but it says “This domain name has just been registered.”  The only thing is, it hasn’t, it was registered years ago, but the bigger issue is that the site which has been up for years is down.

Now when you call their support, as I’ve done twice today, they’ve been instructed to tell you that it is the fault of the new hosting account.  This is complete rubbish and they know it.  If you’ve set up your new account at the new host before you change your domain name servers (DNS), they’re ready to accept it.  The problem lies squarely with the registrar e.g. 1&1 and for the management to have instructed their support to tell people it’s the fault of the new host is just inexcusable.   Every registrar will tell you that it can take time to propagate the DNS settings across the Internet, but when you’re working with a quality registrar you’re going to see the change in a matter of minutes, not hours.  That doesn’t mean that at some point you might not pop on your site during the first 24 hours and find it momentarily inaccessible, but that’s rare, and when working with good registrars I’ve never seen it happen.

Do yourself a favor and start with a quality registrar.  I recommend Godaddy for domain names, I’ve got a reseller account there but I am not even going to put the link in this post, that’s not the point.  The point is to help save you some headaches.

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