Awful 123-reg experience

[elrandom3]

<rant approaching.. those allergic or not interested, look away now! >

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 over.. you can return to whatever you were doing >

[acidtechno]

never used them

interesting read, and the service you got was a complete trailer of rubbish, it does seem odd how they handle things if applications for the registration of a domain name fail, how can it fail? perhaps it's something to do with the fact you applied on the weekend?

I don't understand why they make you fill in a form just so they can resubmit, they are the company who handle this sort of thing, why would they need a silly little form? it's ridiculous and time wasting, when it comes to domain names and web hosting - time is important, you don't mess around with forms in the post (did you mean post of e-mail?) when you are trying to register a domain name. All this messing around could have meant you lost out on registering the domain name and someone else got to it instead.

is it really 10p/min? that's horrific, unbelievable, best to stick to e-mail coms and hope for the best!

[elrandom3]

Having a look through Nominet's technical docs, it looks like they use one of two systems to do 'live registrations' - E-Mail or XML-over-HTTP. Wouldn't suprise me if 123-reg were using the e-mail method on some dodgy mailserver

I'm guessing they mean through snail mail for the form, as they guy said "i'll email you a form, and you print it out and get it back to us". I had to do the same thing when I cancelled an old VPS with webfusion, very annoying in todays world of technology.

And yes, 10p/min.. it's an 0871 number. At least it's mildly better than the 09* number they had a while back!

[acidtechno]

it probably is that, dodgy mail server that's been down all weekend, do they work weekends or even handle registrations weekends? just judging from performance with F2S e-mail servers I don't have much trust in stability where Pipex is concerned.

Maybe it's done automatically using e-mail on weekends for registrations and nothing is looked at/known until monday mornings.

I remember the old registration certificates nominet used to send out when you registered a .uk domain - the big paper ones perfect for framing, they used to arrive months after you registered the domain, they seemed like a waste of time. I think they stopped doing those.