123-reg approaching 3,2,1,0
23 April 2023It was not that long ago that I had to move several of my domains off my long-time registrar 123-reg, and in response to further changes to their services I have today transferred another batch of domains from them to Google Domains. I am still far from abandoning 123-reg completely but things are really moving in that direction as I am losing faith in the hosting service as a whole
Small but critical features
As part of an upgrade of their email system they will no longer be providing catch-all email forwarding, which is a pain as I have no single list of all the name handles I use with each domain, and the only way I could see to guarantee continued service was to relocate all domains used for email to Google Domains. In addition the number of email forwarders will be significantly less generous than the current system, which although would in itself not affect me when taken in context of the other recent service reductions has the optics of a provider in decline. To be fair 123-reg still has very good technical support but the only times I have ever needed to use it can all be traced back to faults with the back-end systems, such as getting authorisation codes for transferring.eu and .nz domains because I had the suspicion these might also be withdrawn at some point as well.
One benefit of the mass transfer of domains is clearing out all the out-of-date contact details, although in practice the only times the postal addresses were used was an attempted fraud where a transfer form was disguised as a renewal reminder. However these days I am making a general if not exactly thorough effort at consolidating all contact details out there with my London apartment.