IONOS / 1&1 Support

Today is the turn of IONOS (1&1) - and it isn't about the irritating woman on their ads - it's the difficulty of finding out how to get support via email or chat for a written trail, rather than a telephone call. 

There are some good reasons to use IONOS, including their introductory offers for hosting and SSL certificates. However, their support options are a major issue. We've been having problems for the past week or so, which are... 

• On October 3rd, we received notification of a client's hosting renewal, This was no longer required so we set the renewal to cancel; 
• The confirmation wasn't clear so we checked with 'chat' who confirmed that it was cancelled. We copy/pasted this conversation for possible future reference; 
• Last week, payment was taken for renewal. 

Since then, we have tried several times daily to contact 'chat' with this result EVERY SINGLE TIME 

So, to summarise, currently there is no 'chat' facility, they have also removed their 'raise a ticket' facility and all reference to all email addresses (we searched the site). Notification emails from them are all no-reply.

Next, we searched through our emails and found previous emails from support and billing so we sent our query to these addresses, with no luck. However, we did find an email address on the internet for their cloud support and actually received a reply, which was: 

Hi,

You are here on the IONOS Cloud support, and you are a IONOS Core customer.
Please contact them:

support@ionos.de
0049 (0721) 170 555

Their support is now only available from Germany?  Unbelievable. So I contacted them and here is their standard response... 

Hallo,

vielen Dank für Ihre E-Mail.

Ihre Zufriedenheit mit unseren Produkten liegt uns am Herzen! Daher ist uns Ihre Anfrage sehr wichtig.

Wir werden uns innerhalb der nächsten 48 bis 72 Stunden in einer persönlichen E-Mail um Ihre Anfrage kümmern. In Ausnahmefällen kann es auch mal länger dauern, bitte haben Sie dann etwas Geduld mit uns.

Unser Tipp für Sie: Antworten auf viele Kundenanfragen finden Sie jederzeit in unserem Hilfe-Center unter https://ionos.de/hilfe .

Für weitere Fragen stehen wir Ihnen unter der Telefonnummer 0721 170 555 rund um die Uhr - zu Ihren Festnetzkonditionen - zur Verfügung.

Basically, they usually respond within 3 days. 

What a farce! 

UPDATE. There's a Twitter account for UK support - message has now been sent to them... 

FINAL UPDATE (hopefully). It took a while but, by various means, we received a response from IONOS Support, asking for proof of cancellation confirmation, as they could not find it in their files. This was sent* and, almost instantly, we received confirmation that cancellation has been activated. 

*To vindicate our insistence of a written support trail, how would things have worked out if we had only had a verbal exchange? The difficulty with finding an email contact address far outweighed the difficulty we may have had in proving that the service was confirmed as cancelled.

UH-OH ANOTHER UPDATE Pleased to report that the refund has been applied to the account. An account that will not be used, going forward. So we now need to get back to them to request that the refund is returned to the card from which it was taken. However this is resolved, we'll post it here. 

REFUND RECEIVED

Case closed.

Thanks, IONOS.