The 123 Reg Fail Blog

We received a comment from a chap who has experienced a major issue with 123-reg – so i thought it only fair to share it with you all;

Thanks for putting this up independent blog site up, i wrote a nice long complaint blog and submitted it to the 123reg webblog yesterday – interesting i submitted it as a comment following on from an article called “Don’t tell your visitors to “Get Lost” – learn the art of good website navigation” ….guess what…..their blog is only for good news….customer problems get deleted off. 123REG are not proactivly engaging with their customers to show via their blog how they resolve issues for clients. As buying consumers we all know it only adds to our confidence to deal with them and their credibility as a good company. By mediating the problem away and still not addressing the issue, forces people like us to go online elsewhere and start a blog attack to let others know that the customer service being offered is ok for basic stuff, but isnt as good as it could be when you need some help or feel that the service being offered by 123 reg isnt fair.

It is now 12 hours since i put my complaint online, if that was Vodafone, i would have had a message back from them within the hour to try and resolve the situation.

My problem was that i purchased an instant site plus package for my personal domain name from them using our company account login, due to changes at work i decided that i would like to put mine and a number of other personal domains i own into my own account with 123Reg.

So we initiated an internal transfer with no problems or notification that the instant site service would become invalid on the designated domain if it was transferred to another account.

On spending my 10p a minute to request that this just be transferred over as well, i was given the “computer says no” little Britain customer service treatment. I was also informed that i should have read all the t&c’s before purchasing as its in there.

So i clicked through to the T&C’s and asked to be shown where it was stated, Beverley (not allowed to give our surname out)hadnt got a clue where it was in the small print and proceeded to start reading at 10p a minute. I asked that a manager then call me back to discuss this as really it should just be a press of a button to resolve this problem, i’m still a customer, they’ve had my money and i’ve had no satisfaction.

Managers are not available and do not make calls to customers, please write in….not email…they are a digital company for gods sake.

We all know what happens to complaint letters…they get filed in the round filing tray and customers get bored and go away and tell friends about the poor service they received from 123REG…with 2million domains perhaps 123REG aren’t bothered about a couple of people that are disappointed with the customer back up they were given.

Lets see if they come back to me by close of play today, obviously if they resolve the issue for me i’ll write about it as well….that’s only fair.

When someone decided to invent 0845 numbers their initial intentions were good, but then mobiles came along and screwed up the whole arrangement. Mobile providers decided to not allow 0845 umbers in their call allowance, so you would get charged a fortune to ring them.

Well sitting on hold for 3 hours can now fall within your allocated call allowance thanks to SayNoto 8070!

Here we are folks, the number for 123-reg – 020 858 77 558

It works as of 16/02/09 as i just called it to check

Ugh! I’ve had it up to here with almost all Pipex-based companies (only exception is F2S, for the time being). No-one seems to care about the customer journey anymore, and it’s annoying me!

I submitted a domain registration on Saturday evening for a domain I wanted, expecting it to be live in a couple of hours as is usually the case. Half an hour later I get a couple of emails confirming my registration, and giving me details on how to manage my new domain. Excellent.

I kept checking the whois database, and the global nameservers to see if we had any life, which over the rest of Saturday there was not. Same for Sunday, Monday and also Tuesday morning.

There’s me thinking, this isn’t right.. probably just an oversight somewhere, i’ll give them a buzz. Guy on the phone tells me that the automatic system with Nominet “is like that”, and “not all automatic registrations go through”, although “we are discussing with Nominet as to why this happens”.

Fantastic. A technical glitch. No worries, they haven’t taken any money as they didn’t actually register it. I can just re-submit it, right? WRONG! They took the money eventhough they hadn’t confirmed with Nominet as to whether it was live. Okay, so they can just re-submit it on my behalf? WRONG! I have to fill in a form and mail it back to them if that’s to happen.

So, options? Wait 5 days for a refund, and re-register the domain straight away. Or go down the route of this form thing.

I told them what I thought of the service, and what they can do with it. I’ll be checking for my refund in the next few days. In the meantime, I jumped to fasthosts to get the domain, and guess what… registered within 5 minutes.

The thing that gets me most.. why didn’t 123-reg email me and tell me that the Nominet registration has failed? How many more people have had money taken just for no domain to actually get registered? Why should I have to phone a 10p/min phoneline just for them to say “oops! our fault!”.

Needless to say, I shan’t be using them again, and will be moving my domains away when they’re up for renewal. I’ll also consider carefully whether I keep my businesses with Webfusion and f2s.

Anyone else have any experience with something like this? Would be interesting (for me at least ) to hear!

Rant lifted from TiscaliUser.net

Companies such as 123-reg get to a stage where they start to think they can do whatever they like. They dictate rules and change things whenever they want. The following story is a situation that arose a while back for me that i am sharing for everyone here. Remember – always check through how your 123-reg control panel is configured else you may encounter something like this happening to you.

We have around 40 domain names in our account, and we probably have at least one come up for renewal every month. Normal procedure for me is to leave it until we have spare cash – and then log in and renew it.

We store our credit card details on there site, so every time we do this or every time we buy a domain name, we do not have to write in all the numbers every time – Its to save US time basically.

Now, we had a .CC domain name that had come up for renewal a month or two ago, and it was gonna cost us over £30 to renew it for one year! So as we were not using it, we decided to leave it and let it expire.

3 days ago we received an email invoice from 123-reg for the .CC domain name?? We logged in, and the .CC domain name was not in our renewal list any more? I checked, and the amount had been taken from our bank and the domain name had been re-registered without us authorising it.

What the hell?

I rang 123-reg and they fobbed me off with some rubbish about auto renewal and how i had stored the credit card details in my account, so in doing so had given them permission to take my money whenever they wanted to? I was under the impression that was for my benefit, not theirs.

English contract law states (basically) that if I don’t say i want something, then i don’t want it!

Why do they send emails out every few days reminding you to renew if they are going to do it for you anyway?  I had even renewed some other domain names and left that one out on purpose! Yet they STILL renewed it and stole my money to pay for it!

I read all the way through their terms and conditions, and there was no mention of this credit card auto renewal thing – no where did it say “if you put your details in, we’ll use them when we want” so in my books that means they cant.

I rang them up again to see if I could speak to someone who wasn’t a total moron, but surprise surprise another moron on the end of the phone saying something that is blatantly written on a bit of paper in front of him. I had enough of them eventually and contacted our bank to make them retract the payment. It basically went on and on but in the end we got locked out of our account and had to pay them to get unlocked. As we have important domain names we didnt want to lose.

In the end they got what they want. Typical!

Send us your 123-Reg stories and maybe together we can get our voice heard!

Oh, if you want to call 123-reg and dont want to pay 10p a minute, then call 02085877558 as this alternative number replaces the old alternative 01782 605 399 number that seems to no longer go anywhere.

We were approached by a customer who came to us a while back for some help with hosting. We ended up copying their domain name to our 123-Reg account so that we could manage it with ease.

The time has come to renew their domain, and they wanted two more buying at the same time. We logged in to 123-Reg and searched for the new domains, they were available – so i added to the basket and clicked “ok, lets continue”

It then asked me about WHOIS privacy – i always usually opt out of these things as i dont think its a good idea to publish info on the WHOIS for everyone to see, especially if the domain name contains dodgy content.

I clicked next, and it stuck two £9.95 charges on the domains. Pay for WHOIS privacy? What the hell? I have never had to do this before, and i only bought some domain names last week!

I did some google searching and i found a few other people with similar problems. One guy even said;

“The idea of paying for whois privacy doesn’t sit right with me. It’s like those registrars are saying “pay us more money or we will give your personal details to anyone who wants them”

I kinda agree to an extent – why should we have to pay ten quid to opt out of something that has been free forever. I bet its people like 123-reg shooting themselves in the foot by selling domain names for so little.

Hopefully the other registrar we use hasnt started robbing people, too.

Welcome friends! You have probably found this site when you have been searching on the net for 123-Reg complaints or looking for other people who you can share your stories about your troubles with the uk domain name giants.

I used 123-Reg for years and years, and never had an issue with them. But then the issues started – and boy did they start!

All the stories and information on here is from actual sources who have had issues with 123-reg.

This site is in NO WAY affiliated with 123-reg, for domain names click here!