Finally lost patience
11 July 2024
For little over a year I have been transferring domains away from my long-time registrar 123-Reg.
This started because they were withdrawing support for some of the TLDs (top-level domains) I was using at the time but since then I have become increasingly unimpressed by their service.
The final straw came when they charged me renewal for a domains that not only had I transferred away, the transfer was also handled in such a way that left things broken.
While I cannot attribute the entire blame to 123-Reg I am inclined to suspect they are the ones causing the faults.
Doubts about system robustness
All too often in the past doing routine things has involved raising a support ticket, and in all fairness 123-Reg's support people have actually been very good, but this has left me with strong doubts about how good their back-end systems really are.
In the past when I had transferred domains away the existing DNS records were maintained which gave a bit of de-facto grace to migrate things over to new name-servers, but with the most recent transfers it looks like they were removed from 123-Reg's systems before the new registrar had time to replicate them.
This change caught me off-guard and I only found out when I had reports of bounced emails.
This would not be so much of an issue if the transfers were same-day but there is sometimes a waiting period of up to seven days before a transfer is complete, and the latter transfer completed right at the start of a long weekend trip where I was mostly off-the-grid.
A new user interface has also been rolled out over the last year or two but it looks like they have had issues with the roll-out, and I did wonder whether it was a works-in-progress.
Payment issues
Nominet in recent years has been jacking up the price of UK domains which is why I dumped most of them, and as with most of the other TLDs they still offer the mark-up 123-Reg adds is reasonable, actually being a few quid cheaper than the registrar I transferred a domain to yesterday.
The problem is they charge for things like domain privacy and protection which others provide for free, which completely destroys any competitiveness in pricing.
Even though they were quite quick in issuing a refund for the incorrect billing, them charging renewal for a domain I had transferred away was the last straw.
As a precaution I have disabled the pre-approval they had with my PayPal account.
What next
At the moment there are now only two domains of mine left on 123-Reg: One that I am planning of letting go, and one which for various reasons to do with who I am running the site for as well as its subject matter, I am reluctant to migrate the registration to a personal account.
For UK domains especially the more exotic ones it is likely the best thing going but it is not the same outfit I fondly remember starting to use almost two decades ago, and in the longer-term I want to reduce the number of different registrars I use.