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