IONOS Hosting vs. ScaleGrid vs. Volusion

I run five websites off of 1&1 for different outshoots of the company. For our web needs it works perfectly. We have a midgrade hosting package and it works perfectly. I know if issues arose from traffic or storage space 1&1 would have a solution for us.

Incentivized

Volusion is a good company if you're starting out. The problem is that, if you want more complexity out of the program, you're kind of stuck. Also the regular time out errors and slow downs can be very frustrating. Packages that miss overnight deadlines because your system stops working can cost you customers. In today's highly competitive market, that's just something that's hard to put up with. If you have a lower volume of business you might be able to work around these issues.

Incentivized

• Private registration: 1&1 offers free private registration which makes them an automatic favorite.
• Reliable customer service: always someone available when I call in and I have never had my issue not get resolved.
• Easy to use dashboard: domains in one place with DNS settings and other things that can be tweaked. It's easy to add an SSL certificate to domains as well.

Incentivized

• Templates are pre-built for a good end user experience. I've gone through the process of building custom sites as well as tweaking both free and paid templates that Volusion's design team provides.
• Their support team didn't use to be as helpful, but in recent years have answered nearly all questions I've had. Their support section within the database provides detailed walkthrus as well.
• Order processing is easy once you've been trained on the system. We got to a point where nearly the entire process was automated from initial purchase through shipping.

Incentivized

• From my experience, customer services does not know how to address issues in an understandable language
• I feel that they arbitrarily overcharge w/o any explanation
• In my opinion it is really pricey

• API calls use the previous call as a reference, even if you weren't the one we made the previous call. Can lead to data gaps, so you often have to set a manual date range to look back to make sure you aren't missing any data.
• Not as customizable as most ecommerce platforms
• Not as many integration options as most platforms

Incentivized

When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.

I know what to do to add a new product, promotion or do an analysis of sales.

Incentivized

In over 8 years of operations, we have not had a single outage that affected us.

Incentivized

The email system has not impeded out mail flow in any way, and we do not notice the delays we sometimes see with other systems that include spam/junk mail filtering.

Incentivized

You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.

Incentivized

It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).

Rackspace I find to be too pricey for the service they offer. Pagely is very much WordPress oriented. I've had downtime with both that I haven't experienced with 1&1.

Incentivized

While k-eCommerce was very glamorous to us because it integrates with our main workflow, it just didn't have some of the marketing features that are so integral to the way we do business online. The set-up costs were also way too high. Volusion is so affordable and feature heavy, it makes it very difficult for any shopping cart provider to compete. You can find others who are competitively priced and have similar features, but they simply aren't as robust (at least for the way we use it)

The scalability of the email solution far exceeds our needs and would be suitable for organizations not looking for an enterprise sized multipurpose solution (O365, Google Workspace, etc).

Incentivized

• 1&1 host our email and domains adequately. We can easily add and remove emails as needed.
• 1&1 also works with our website platform, Memberclicks.

Incentivized

• Honestly, when you're in the dashboard, the UX is simply horrendous. I mean, everything that should be 1-2 clicks away is 4-6 clicks away, and each pages takes at least four seconds to load. You just find yourself wasting a lot of time waiting for things to load. This should be more simple.