123-Reg Problems - Approach with Care

A real pain in the bum this. I spent well over an hour trying to get though to them on the phone - at the end of the conversation I mentioned that I thought it was a bit of a con having to wait so long on hold and she said “well you could email us”. I did not know if I should laugh or cry considering both times I’ve sent them e-mails I’ve never even received the courtesy of a response!

Good luck mate - hope you have it sorted.

I think its a case of you pay for what you get. We tend to use a German company called joker.com which offer a range of domain related tools and are fairly quick at registering your domain. We also use One and One internet.

Jamie

James - glad you got it sorted in the end. I’m going to hold out and see how long it takes to get an email reply this time.

Jamie - thanks for the comment. I’ve used 1&1 in the past too but didn’t enjoy the experience either! I’ll take a look at joker but do they handle .uk domains?

In terms of price joker, 123-reg and 1&1 all seem pretty comparable but I think I might need to look at paying a bit more at least for the domains that matter more to me.

We started with 123-reg several years ago and at the time they were one of the best, they have gone down hill so fast over the last 24 months it’s a complete joke. We are now in a position where we have hundreds of domains with them and their Support is non-existant and the service is totally unreliable.

We renewed about 20 domains recently some .co.uk and some .com ONLY the .co.uk domains got renewed. Several support tickets and no answers, no one answering the phone and in the meantime two of the .com’s have now expired

I would not recommend anyone use 123-reg, steer well clear of 123-reg.co.uk

They seem to be burying their head in the sand at the expense of their customers.

thanks for your comments Stu

It’s now 10 days later and they haven’t replied to my emails or registered the domain. Everytime I phone it’s a 25 minute or more queue so I give up waiting

Do the following:

1) Go register the domain at another provider who will bother to do it.

2) Phone up your bank / credit card company and ask them to issue a charge back against the payment (assuming it’s been taken).

That should sort it.

Same as above. Used the instant site builder. When I tried to save what I had done all info just disappeared. 25 minute wait for help at call centre. Redid the site. Lost info again. Third time redid it and got to the “congratulations you can view your site on…” Of course nothing there when I looked. Still nothing there. Waste of £20.

Same as above. I bought and paid for my domain name on the 19th May and it still wasn’t registered over a month later. After the usual non productive phone calls, emails etc I gave up and went to another provider (Global Registration Services Ltd) who registered my domain name in just two days. I was very lucky in that I only lost £6.09, it could have been a lot worse in that somebody else could have stole my domain name before 123-Reg got their act together. How can 123-Reg be allowed to get away with what seems to me to be legalised theft ?. Is there no government agency etc who polices these things. Let’s wait and see how long it takes before this company appears on watchdog. Please avoid 123-Reg at all costs.

They have managed to lose my domains, they have vanished from my control panel and despite sending four emails in the past two days still no reponse. Sounds like a job for Watchdog, there’s so many people experiencing problems with this company a bit of media exposure may give them a bit of a kick

I’ve been with 123-reg for a few years, and had no problems with them until now.
I’ve been transferring some .com’s domains over to my account with 123-reg it’s been over 6 weeks and one of them has still not transferd over.
Also i’ve got two domain names with 123-reg that, i’ve just changed the dns name servers in my 123-reg account control panel, to my new hosting dns names server and 3 days i’ve still got no website showing up.

123-reg says it takes time to show the new site address, and transfers can take time as well.
that’s good news for them, when my domain names keeps showing there holding page adverts all the time.

I have been trying to get my site to come up and it won’t. I’ve tried for most of the day and there has been no chance. I to come up. It’s just a new one and I’ve given out business cards and everything and anyone who tries to log on isn’t going to get the site. i’ve contacted them twice……….nothing! my questions haven’t even come up on my support yet.
Even when I was on my admin page adding things to the shop I couldn’t get the shop to come up to see pictures of the things I had added. The last site I had was far cheaper and I didn’t have any problems. Well only one it was a dot com and I couldn’t change the postage to Royal mail. Im fed up with them already and only joined on the 25th of last month.

We bought from 123 REG an Instant Site Pro thinking that it would be easy to customise to suit our needs but alas it was in no way what they stated – “create professional websites in minutes with this easy to use tool”

The headers were customisable to a degree but there was no way to get rid of the smiling faces etc.

I wrote to them several times but I have had no reply. They are not a company I would ever recommend.

Gordon

Sounds familiar - they’ve been OK for us until now, when we need to contact them as their control panel will not allow nameservers to be changed yet, despite the domain being purchased months ago - if anyone has their support telephone number, I’d be grateful for it - I can’t see it anywhere, and their 123-support knowledge-base is less than helpful!

Anyone had issues uploaded to a hosted web site?
Made the mistake of doing an update this morning and now I have a load of files which all apear to be 0 bytes in length on the 123 server, and my site no longer works!

Mmmmm!

Their technical support number is 0871 230 9525. Open 9am -7pm M-F, and 9am-5.30pm Sat.
I know this because I haven’t received any email for 2 days now, and I run my own business - it’s crippling me. They had apparently had server problems yesterday and their site went down too but it’s meant to be fixed. My email account password has somehow been changed (not by me) and I also can’t connect to their POP3 server. Their technical support line said it was working ok now and he’d email me details of how to use webmail! Great considering I can’t receive email and their site looks like it’s now gone down again so I wouldn’t be able to access webmail anyway. Anyone else having email problems this week?
I’m seriously considering transferring.

Well it seems to be OK today, as you say Kirstie, It may have been a server problem yesterday, even though the status on their web site said all OK. I can upload correctly today, but I have already taken steps to move my hosted addresses away from them. Time will tell if they do actually move to the new hosting site. My web hosting is due to expire in January in any case, so just making a move earlier than planned…

Thanks Kirsty!

123-Reg had been OK for us until we registered a .com domain through them (we usually just use them for .co.uk), which I won’t be repeating in a hurry!

I too am having problems with 123reg. I have been trying patiently for over a week to configure my pop3 email but had no success at all, It will not allow me to access my popmail through the 123 control panel either. (password continually rejected depite changing it several times).I have spent quite a bit of money with 123 and bought the add ons etc, but I am disappointed.
Anyone else having the same problems?

Paul. I have the same problem in that I can’t access my mail through the 123 control panel because it consistently rejects my password, even after I’ve just changed it.

Kirstie, This whole thing has cost me nearly £70, but the amount of time I have spent trying to access my Email doesnt bear thinking about. Its now been 11 days of doing my head in. I have had to leave it alone now as my patience is starting to wear thin. I havent bothered trying to Email the customer support because other bloggers say it can be days on end (if ever) you get a reply. There is no way I am going to dial their premium rate number either, and hand over to them more of my hard earned. Seems to me just another automated money machine, the No.1 priority is to relieve us of our cash. I wish I had read about other peoples experiences before I bothered with 123reg.

hi ive stummbled over this site whilst trying to find 123 reg phone number, i sell flowers on line and got my site from 123 reg, it seems to have gone down, again, is this right can anyone let me know if its maintenance or what
thanks
gill

I have been with 123-reg a month, their tech support seemed bad but managed to work my way through despite them. The big problem is now they have sent me two emails saying my subscription is due for the next month, I have stored my credit card with them for payment which they took on Monday, but they have sent my ecommerce site to just their holding page and my customer can no longer see my hard work, I have emailed them and searched in vain for a phone number. I am now the proud owner of a very expensive 123 holding page. They are the worst company in history!! I use Lycos and 1&1 who are not too bad.

I have been with 123-reg a month, their tech support seemed bad but managed to work my way through despite them. The big problem is now they have sent me two emails saying my subscription is due for the next month, I have stored my credit card with them for payment which they took on Monday, but they have sent my ecommerce site to just their holding page and my customers can no longer see my hard work, I have emailed them and searched in vain for a phone number. I am now the proud owner of a very expensive 123 holding page. They are the worst company in history!! I use Lycos and 1&1 who are not too bad.

No reply from support for a week. Company is a joke now.

Just transferred all my stuff to Daily.co.uk, where you can speak to real and helpful people on the phone and from where emails arrive immediately (even when 123 was working they arrived a minute or 2 late, god knows what they were doing with them!)

Fed up with some emails taking hours to arrive, or not arriving at all. Transferred my hosting to Rackspace - paying more for a dedicated server but the personal service and spot-on delivery make it worthwhile. My advice - avoid 123 reg!

Going insane at the moment trying to get the problem of my “mailbox quota exceeded”. Have just handed out a lot of my business cards and no one can send me an email - this is really loosing me big business. Have emailed the support team and got the following reply:

We currently have a problem with the popboxes, apologies for any inconvenience caused by this.

We are in the process of adding more servers to deal with the increase in traffic that our pop server has received. This is being done over the next few days so you should start to see an improvement when retrieving mail.”

Great, except even getting one email would be considered an improvement!!!! Not a happy bunny!!!! I also have trouble trying to work out how to contact the support team - have been trying to send a folow up email but with no success.

123-reg are crap! I’ve been waiting on the phone in a queue for 35 minutes now! And I’m absolutely livid….!

Jayne time to give up, they were using this excuse a year ago. The company is so useless now it is really just a scam, transfer your domains and email addresses and cut your losses… at least that part of their site works so you can redirect your domains!

I too have been a customer of 123-Reg for a few years and agree things have gone seriously downhill. Just found out this week that a domain they had auto-renewed and invoiced me for earlier this year, has not in fact been renewed at all! Then today tried to register a domain, paid with my usual credit card but it was rejected with the message: “Oops! To protect against fraud, your purchase has been placed on hold. Please contact our support department quoting the reference number BID - xxxxxx”. That’s twice in two weeks that’s happened. They make it almost impossible to find their support number on their website (it’s 0871 230 9525 by the way) and I too just get the 25 minute current wait message so I assume this is just a fixed message!

I have submitted my problems via the ticket system on their support site, so will just have to wait and see if they get back to me. Looks like I need to move the 160 domains I have registered with them elsewhere. Shocking!

If anyone stumbles across this in the next few days - I have spoken just to the 123 guys today - they have been having major outages with their DNS servers for a couple of weeks and it has got worse today.

They are working on it but its just one of those things - however I have normally found their uptime to be very good indeed - with the excepeption of when Gloucester etc was under 5 feet of water in September and their call centre had to shut, I cant rememeber any other downtime…

Also they have changed their 0870 number to only charge 10p a minute - it was £1.50 last time I rang!!!!!!!!!

Their DNS seems to have been down since around 4pm Friday 16th Nov 07. Unfortunately their support site is on that DNS, so no way of making contact! I’ve faxed them just to make myself feel happy !

I must say, in 4 years I’ve not had a problem (until now), and I have 5 minute monitoring on my sites. I have always received answers to e-mail questions, so fingers crossed they are sorting it out asap ! Just a note - I am not connected to them in any way, it’s just that people are always ready to complain when things go wrong, but stay quiet when things are OK

Hi there. Just wanted to say thanks to Gavin & Tony for their info about 123-reg. I’m having lots of difficulty today seeing our website. Let’s hope they get the problems sorted soon.

Things are looking up. My sites are back on their nameservers now….I just gotta go through them all now and add the type and MX records back….deep joy

123-reg are back and working now using ns.webfusion.co.uk.
ns2.webfusion.co.uk. as their own nameservers after trying out ns.123-reg.co.uk and ns.hosteurope.co.uk configurations since around friday lunchtime.

The nameservers for hundreds of thousands of their customers domains have been changed with lots of dns records including A records and MX records lost so a huge amount of work for 123-reg customers to do to recover from the damage and more ongoing email misery until fixed. In UK hosting terms this is the equivalent of cleaning up after a massive hurricane.

We havn’t started to count the SEO damage but have already seen to long established PR4 sites in our portfolio dropped to PR2 as a result of the chaos with 123-reg.

Right now the ns.webfusion.co.uk. & ns2.webfusion.co.uk. nameservers are advertising they they will do recursive lookups (i.e; are open to abuse and dos attacks) although they appear to be blocking such attempts at the moment. ns.123-reg.co.uk & ns1.123-reg.co.uk have the same problem. There are several other strange apparent misconfigurations with the nameservers at the moment including a very high TTL meaning that the dns changes their customers may take a long time to propagate.

After using 123-reg for many years and advising many others to do so we’ve spent the night (yes - nearly all of it) moving the nameservers for all the domains we look after as far away from 123-reg/pipex/hosteurope/webfusion as we can as a temporary move prior to transferring all our names away over the next 2 days. After several years of recommending 123-reg (as they deserved it) we are now after a year of downward spiralling appaling service and reliability advising clients, friends, and associates to move away ASAP and doing the same ourselves.

Daily.co.uk is who I moved to 2 months ago. 100% satisfied. 123 is a joke, a very bad joke.

Please can someone give me this telephone number to call 123 reg on?? I have just built the Instant site thing but it keeps taking me to 123 reg website when I put my address in the browser!
Many thanks
Mark R

The 123-reg telephone number is on their site here

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/contactUs.shtml

“Telephone us on 0871 230 9525. We’re here 9am - 7pm Monday to Friday. Calls cost 10p per minute from a BT landline. We sometimes get busy at peak times.”

thanks for this, I managed to find it in the end it seems that sites aren’t added instantly but take upto 48 hours. Fair enough seems to be up and running now.

I moved away from 123-reg last year. after problems changing my Name server. For some reason, for this particular domain, it just wouldn’t change and i had to raise a support ticket each time i needed it changed (now i know you don’t really need to change Nameservers that often, i just happed to change host 2 times last year) after about a million emails and phone calls, i gave up and moved my domains to another registtra.

The 0871 230 9525 is the best way to get support, however, it’s pot luck weather you get someone who actually knows what they’re talkin about!

Hi can anyone help me i have hosted my website onto 123 reg its showing in the manage my files but there is still the 123 reg homepage when i try and view my website how long does it generally take to go live?

You’re doing a great job. This site (along with the majority of ‘hosts’ on the web) is mis-selling under the Sale of Goods & Services legislation. My site notbornyesterday.org spends a great deal of time laughing at them, harrassing them and repporting themto the various bodies available. Sadly, most of these seemtpo be dead bodies.

One way to overcome the service problem is to send an email demanding a refund of charges,and then when they ignore it issue a winding-up order.

In the meantime, I will tell all interested people to avoid these villains like the bubonic plague they so clearly are.

Best

John Ward

Thsi company has organised itself to rip off the general public. They hide their identity under many company names such as GX Networks, Concentric, XO communications, and the latest is Pipex one Ltd. They cannot be contacted unless you ring a premimum line which keeps you holding forever at 10p per minute. They do not fall under the regulator Ofcom I have tried that and the consumer people only tell you to sue them through the courts. My advice to everyone is not to get involved with this company you will get your fingers burnt. Cheap to get you in, very expensive to get out. Be warned!!!!

Like Gill above, I just stumbled across this blog whilst looking for 123 reg phone number.

I purchased a domain through them last week and went to the site on Monday to purchase a hosting package. Thinking that I had better check that they supported the language first, I raised a ticket and backed it with an email the next morning - no response to either.
I have just phoned them - thank you Frazer, I did not see the number on their contact page - and got a very friendly and helpful girl who explained that they do not support php and have recommended their “sister site” webfusion.

I know that I sjould have looked online for areas such as this blog to check them out beforehand and I suppose I have learned a lesson in not doing so. But, have any of the above posters got an opinion on webfusion and whether I will have trouble now hosting my new domain with anyone other than a company 123 are happy with.

Best regards
Mark

Moved my hosting to PipeTen. No problems with this.

Their support is spot on with only about a couple of hour turnaround in my experience.

What you need are geographical numbers they are often included in you mobile talk plan or even free. They can be found at http://www.saynoto0870.com

For 123-reg number 0871 230 9525
Call: Stoke on trent (01782) 605 399 - Number no longer in use!
Call: London (0208) 5877558 - Answered straight away

For Webfusion number 0871 230 9525
Call: Stoke on trent (01782) 605 800 - Number no longer in use!
Call: Free on 0800 031 7800 - technical support (option 2) gives 0845 130 6956
0800 are often not included in your mobile talk plan so use the geographical.

For Webfusion number 0845 130 6956 (technical support)
Call: Stoke on trent (01782) 605 800 - Number no longer in use!
Try calling: London (0208) 5877558 - (123reg) they are the same company

Regards
Simon

Here is something I tried to do that has been a complete nightmare!

1. Create a www subdomain and point it to a TypePad account subdomain with a a CNAME.
2. Forward the non-www of the domain to the http://www.

FUBAR!

You can do the CNAME, no problem, but try forwarding the non-www to http://www.

I have never seen anything like this, and I’ve worked with dozens of DNS servers, cPanel-like interfaces, registrars, etc.

How do these people stay in business?

We have the same nameserver problems with 123-reg on a regular basis. I phones them (20 minute wait) and was told there was no problem at their end, they blamed our hosting and network settings, which I know were correct because I set them myself. The sites concerned had been working fine, suddenly offline, our server was fine. You tell me?

I’ve sent watchdog (BBC programme) details of this from here;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/contact_computers.shtml

Feel free to do the same, I’m sick of this and am now moving my domains to moniker.