123-reg: anyone else had problems?

[SportsGuy]

I've been using a UK company called 123-reg for the past three years, to register domains and hosting packages. Overall they seem to offer a cheap and reliable service, however I've recently had problems with their "automatic renewal" feature, and have had to make official complaints several times before being eventually refunded by senior management. Their first-line customer service can be very defensive and unhelpful.

Has anyone else had problems with the 123-reg "automatic renewal" feature, or their first-line customer service?

 

[KM-Tiger]

What was the problem?

That a domain wasn't renewed when you wanted it to, or was renewed when you didn't want it to?

 

[SportsGuy]

There are a couple of problems:

1. The control panel functionality is temperamental to say the least.
2. Each time you purchase a domain (I have over 50 with them) they forceably store your bank card details, which impacts on 3... You have to raise a ticket after every single domain purchase to get them to manually remove you stored card details from the system.
3. There is no way to permanently turn off automatic domain renewals. They do e-mail you in advance however this often comes back to problems with (1).

The company have said domain renewals is for "the customer's benefit", however you can't simply cancel the feature, and by my maths the domain privacy feature (which is also subject to auto renewal in a separate section of the control panel from domain renewal) could be worth over £1million a year to them.

With other domain companies I've used in the past everything was in one place, and domain renewals could be completely removed.

Other than these issues, I've had no major problems with them.

 

[gibby]

Ive used them for a few years, with a couple of issues.

they keep trying to bill me for a domain renewal that we moved sometime back.
We also had an issue a few years back where all the domains registered stopped working. This wasn't fixed until Monday morning as they ahd no support at all over the weekend

Other than that they have been fine & sent me a renewal notice miles in advance.

 

[SportsGuy]

It's very disappointing given that most other areas of 123-reg's service is very good. They only seem to process refunds when you get senior management involved though. I've spent over £1,000 with 123-reg and the first-line customer service reps are terrible. They'll do anything to avoid a refund, I guess because management puts pressure on them.

 

[theangrydog]

I used to use them for my domain portfolio, wish i never did, lost over 20 websites through them no renewing them and im some cases billing me twice, i would recommend you change to a new host

 

[OldWelshGuy]

I have been with them for many many years, and only ever had 1 issue and that was they failed to renew a 10yr old domain. I have alerts set though and manually check my domain renewals.

Safe to say they are my registrar of choice.

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

We offer domain registration with the option of storing the card details for auto-renewal or sending a renewal order which must be paid before the domain is renewed. We have clients using both options as some will have accounts with hundreds of domains they want to check and pay for individually and some will just have their hosted name which they want to make sure gets renewed automatically. We aren't the cheapest but we provide in-house technical support (telephone/email/ticket) and dns management as standard.

 

[jamie1183]

I hold well over 100 domain names with them and not had many problems at all in 7 years

The control panel seemed to have a few problems a week or 2 ago but looks like its all working fine this week.

Ive not had any issues as yet with renewals. Ive also always found their support pretty good