Mass domain hijack leaves Reg reader angry with 123-Reg

Hmmm, sounds kind of familiar

I had a problem with WebFusion earlier in the year. Security was being compromised. I kept clearing everything, changing passwords etc but several weeks later it was compromised again. I was never keen of the "We can't be bothered to e-mail you a response, you've got to login to us" type support system and the best they could come up with was:

"migrate to a newer system. Contact our sales department".

Knowing that with the best will in the world this would involve not only the migration , but also correcting errors caused by newer versions of software etc, I decided to shop around and got a better hosting deal. I still had to migrate and yes, I still had to edit some pages because of newer versions of PHP etc, but let's hope I get a better support system with the new host

Used 123-reg for years

And their support is total pants. The 1st line (and only line I suspect) Id10t's wouldn't know a glue record from reverse DNS.

At one time they were trying to sell .name domains but their web form always sanitised the . out of firstname.lastname so you could never register a valid domain. After a week of trying to explain it to the monkeys, I just gave up in the end.

123-reg support

123-reg support is abysmal. They seem to have staff that have no intention of answering questions properly or researching facts and don't seem to have any access to a proper whois or DNS lookup.

Webfusion's support is fine as long as you have a dedicated server. If you have any shared or reseller hosting with them, hope it doesn't fall over out of office hours.

Plain-text passwords in emails

My experience with 123-reg was similar to the above. They sent me a password that i had entered into their site in an email, in plain text. When i tried to point out to them that this was a bad thing they kept insisting that the password they had sent me was generated, and that i shouldn't worry because "their web site is secure..." I eventually gave up talking to them. Now just waiting till i can move my business elsewhere.

When a customer says to me that their domain is on 123-reg the first thing I do is try to move them over to mydomain. Terrible terrible service.

Re. Webfusion & the associated companies...

I've had several domains lost despite the automatic renewal showing them renewed and valid.

They deny any fault.

I've had various customer sites compromised repeatedly & they deny any problems with their setup.

Coincidentally (really...), two sites with the worst problems were on the server that 'failed' and took them something like a week to get back online some months ago.

Voting with feet..

I've only ever used 123reg briefly, when transferring domains out for clients, and their control panel always struck me as a horrible mish mash of technologies and frameworks. They sit in the same bracket as Fasthosts to me. I wish the best of luck to all their customers and nothing but bankruptcy to both companies.

123 are [expletive deleted]

Not only have I had to prove to their "support" that their answers were just plain wrong but also they've charged for renewing domains and not done it. The worst problems relate to a mismatch between their registration forms and those at nominet. A minor problem was that sometimes contact names turn up as "trading as" at nominet, fine until Nominet detected that was "wrong" and released the domain at 2 weeks notice by email and despite the registration fee having been paid 3 months prior. (So yes, Nominet are a bunch of clowns too - if you don't renew they suspend the domain for a few weeks, good. But in this instance they immediately released it straight back to the open market instead, rather than try to argue I just re-purchased it).

A bigger issue is that they assume that the contact email addresses are up to date and have expired or suspended domains because an email to that address didn't elicit a response. Now I understand if you say "my fault" but it's not that simple. For a start they are assuming that all emails successfully reach their intended desitination, I guess they've never heard of spam filters giving false positives. Not just that but we all get fake "domain expiry" scam emails and similar so some recipients may either think that's the case or simply not understand the email. With hundreds of accounts under management it takes hours to go through them all to check current info is correct. Customers change their email without me necessarily knowing (esp. as some date back 12 years or more) and no useful bulk edit or reporting tools at 123 (like if I could just get a csv of fields I need to check - surely a simple database extract?).

123 and have phone and postal address as well as email so surely if they get no response to an email they should try post/phone before taking drastic action.

I'd move the lot if I knew anywhere else was any better but without firm guarantees it could be a lot of effort for no benefit.

123-Reg Avoid

I have to be honest. I have been with 123-Reg for years. I have several Domains Names with them and I also HAD a Windows VPS with them.

That is until they decided they wouldn't bother billing me for my VPS for 3 months, discovered the problem, deleted my VPS then when I called them to ask why they said I hadn't paid... even though they didn't bill me....I paid the bill and they told me they had deleted all my data and I would have to start from scratch..... I moved away from them to Windows Azure!

As if that wasn't enough of a shafting.... They didn't inform me a couple of my Domains where expiring... they put them into retention period and wanted about 300 quid to recover 3 domain names. I could go on... at the same time they were deleting my domain names they also deleted my "Free" mailboxes so I couldn't receive any notifications even if they sent them to me.

Needless to say I only have domains registered with them now and that's only because I haven't gotten round to switching them to another provider..... Definitely avoid these boys!

123: and another thing

I found they'd transfered a name from my control panel to another registrar and registrant without my involvement at all despite the fact that the only contact details they had on file were mine. How can that happen?

123 vs ukreg

Fasthosts have always "partnered" with UKReg, and Webfusion with 123-Reg.

Rubbish password security

I moved away from them when I discovered their passwords truncated to the first 8 characters. I pointed this out to them and they did nothing about it. Goodbye 123reg.