My experience with 123 Reg
How their system brought down my website, multiple failings with their technical support and how they’d prefer to blame customers than face reality…
For the past week, my website has been down and it still is as I write this. So far for 5 days…
This is due to the fact that my domain expired and 123 Reg changed my nameservers to ns1.domainexpired.com. When I realised this was the case, despite setting the domain to auto-renew when I originally set it up, I had to manually renew the domain. Over the last week, I’ve made countless phone calls, raised ticket requests, spoke with chat support… but still… it is still down and likely to be so for another 3 days at the very least. So down for 8 days, zero responsibility taken and fundamental damage done.
First issue: Domain set to auto-renew (as it did in previous years) but it didn’t renew, without ANY notice, no communication, it was taken down and neutralised.
Second issue: After discovering the issue I paid for the renewal manually, but this was not sent to the registrar for another 48 hours, due to an issue with their backend system, further delaying the update to bring my website back up and running.
Third issue: As the domain is a .it — and they changed the nameservers as part of their takedown process — it apparently takes 5 days for the change to revert back as the nameservers need to be “checked” by the registry before they can go live again…
That’s not what Nic.it said though… (they are the ones that manage .it domains…)
Interesting isn’t it. If the people that manage the service say it is instant, and have confirmed that, why is it taking 5 days? Or why am I being told it is going to take 5 days? Beyond frustrated to say the least. I have to question if I am being told the right information…
Fourth issue: They blame me for their broken system and have said this wouldn’t have happened if the domain was set to auto-renew. Hold on, lets revisit issue one… it was always set to auto-review, and auto-renewed last time… so someone, or an error their system has for some reason changed this.
Regardless, the failings illustrated across the other issues still can’t be justified.
To see if I was the only one having issues, I then turned to Twitter and searched for 123 Reg and found a whole host of issues that have been reported by customers. Some are similar, and many show that there is a huge number of customers that have issues.
This really does highlight the scale of the problem, poor service, and would also question if what is being sold is fit for purpose.
The issues others are experiencing range from…
Account details being changed without knowledge?
Extended downtime for client websites?
I guess they may have been busy dealing with a huge DDOS attack…
More customer service issues…
Downtime for customers…
Platform not working?
A few quips here and there…
More frustration that client and customer websites are down…
Oh — a reminder that they also deleted a huge number of customer websites accidentally recently…
Potential security issues… don’t most companies say that this information should NEVER be divulged?
More frustration with the customer service…
Unwilling to take responsibility?
Recommendations to switch…
More delays in responding to issues…
Not only NOT renewing domains that should be… But taking money when they shouldn’t…
This was only a few days of select Tweets that highlighted the many issues that are being experienced by customers that have paid for a service.
I’m clearly not the only one that has had issues, but that doesn’t change the face that I’ve had to switch domains (yes buy a completely new and different domain) to get things back up and running (which has as massive negative effect both short and long-term).
Hope this diary of my experience (so far), helps others decide on where to purchase their domains and internet services from. It has a hugely detrimental effect when the provider cannot provide the service purchased or promised.
Day 5, still down… will share with further updates as they happen…
UPDATE 1: It’s the 15th, the date they said it would have updated and be live… however, it isn’t. Surprised?
UPDATE 2: They are now saying there is an issue with the previously used DNS settings… and the nameserver will not update until that is amended. And also they seem to be retracting the 5 days update time, and agreeing the update should be instant/realtime. So what I have been waiting a week for?! Do they know what they are doing?
