After almost a month and over a dozen emails to support and billing, my recent hosting problem was finally resolved. No fanfare, or even an email letting me know that it had been taken care of. I just went to one of my problem sites, and no more errors.

Two days before that, I received this email from complaints@1and1.com:

Thank you for contacting us.

As a gesture of goodwill, I have refunded the account regarding this
matter.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

That’s great, however the statement “I have refunded the account” is not true, because I haven’t received a refund. We’ll see if they follow through, or even return my email inquiry.

The point of this post, though, is to share the email address complaints@1and1.com. I wasn’t aware of it until now. If I had been, I’m sure I’d already be blacklisted.

In trying to resolve my problem with getting a Disk quota exceeded (122) error on MYSQL Database apps, I received the following email from 1&1 Internet support (in my spam folder, as usual):

Thank you for contacting us.

This case needs to be escalated since we dont root access on our server.

As a temporary workaround, you can create a php.ini file on folder where
your script is running. The file should have like this.

session.save_path = physical path of the temporary folder where you want to save the seesion on your webspace

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

I have nearly 20 database aps and don’t really want to do this for each one as a temporary workaround, so I waited for the permanent fix. Unfortunately, this is the next email I received:

We are always glad to assist you in a timely manner as possible.
We see since you’ve opted to change a file to a .Ini, this has resolved
the issue.
Your disk quota is fine from our end and all looks good from here.

Please clarify if you need any additional assistance regarding this
issue.

Thanks for your patience and for choosing 1&1.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

I didn’t opt to do anything. I am waiting for them to fix it, so looks like time for some more emails! This is the typical 1&1 support approach. Classic. That’s why I don’t have any client sites on 1&1 Internet. Right now I am recommending WestHost.

I just started receiving the the following errors on all my websites hosted on 1&1 internet that have MYSQL databases.

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: open(/tmp/sess_x, O_RDWR) failed: Disk quota exceeded (122) in /path/page.php on line 20

The result is that no session is created, so things that require a session don’t work too well.

Since I am nowhere near my allocated storage capacity, I’m not sure why this is occuring, and feel pretty confident that 1&1 support won’t tell me, even if they know. The support people that I’ve talked to so far don’t even have root access to the server, so I hope they fix it sometime soon. The temporary workaround is just to point the session.save_path somewhere else.

Luckily I use 1&1 for development only, as they are not reliable enough to host client websites, so no customers are effected.

I logged onto my 1&1 Internet Control Panel last week and noticed a new category: Marketing Center. One of the items in that category was “Google Webmaster Tools.” “Excellent,” I thought to myself.

The 1&1 Internet Google Webmaster Tools feature consists of an automated script that generates a file called google_sitemap.xml.gz, which is a compressed xml sitemap file, for the selected domain. It also submits it to Google for you.

The sitemap creation dialog gives you the following options to customize your sitemap file:
-Directory Selection
-File Category Selection
-Excluded Files

Once submitted you can update your sitemap once a day, and it will be resubmitted through the control panel. That’s about it.

This is a really stripped down version of Google Webmaster Tools. If you are just starting out, and want to get sitemaps up quick and easily, 1 &1′s Google Webmaster Tools feature could be the way to go for you. If you want more control over your sitemap and more detailed information on your sites performance and Google’s indexing of it, I’d recommend opening up a Google Account, and downloading GSiteCrawler sitemap generator.