Maybe I'm too young to remember the good times, but to me 1and1 were just the European GoDaddy. Mostly targeting small businesses who didn't know any better and ripping them off with bad services at inflated prices, through a lot of well targeted marketing. Selling things like email with a 250MB inbox and 2MB attachment limit far beyond the time when that was a reasonable offering, and at a far higher price than that was worth (being worth roughly zero).

They started with free .com registration.

They grew their business with this offer, and then degenerated into what you described.

1and1 were also notorious for aggressively trying to collect on "debts" - more than one person I know had 1and1 send debt collection letters to their parents over renewal fees for hosting plans they didn't even want.

They still exist, called ionos now: https://www.ionos.com/

Yes, I should have been more clear. It was another Germany? based provider that gave excellent, even free prices... until they didn't.