Following this report on The Register web site about 123-reg.co.uk (now a Pipex company) I felt I had to blog something.

Both my company and I use the service for most of our “.uk” domain name hosting. The email is a recurring problem and as a result we no longer use the email forwarding. This is a complaint that other 123-reg customers I know have complained about as well.

Another interesting “Quirk” is that occasionally, but very occasionally, returns an incomplete DNS record when an name-server is queried. This is a big problem when it happens it leads to one or more people unable to send through email for a 24 hour period. This has happened at least twice, once affecting another 123-reg customer, and I suspect this has caused other issues in the past.

On one occasion, just after one of these “Quirks”, the settings form one of the domains was reset to the 123-reg defaults and completely blank address information submitted to Nominet.

The thing that really annoyed me was when 123-reg had a problem I notified support, 6 days later I received an email stating that “Your website now appears to be fine. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require further assistance”. In fairness the web site was fine, primarily because I got sick of waiting and moved it away from there servers.

We are still a 123-reg customer, but now host all the important domains on our own servers. We will soon be reviewing the situation as they have had time to solve the problem, but have not even acknowledged the problem. My hope is that they do acknowledge the problem, publicly apologise, and fix it. When it works it is a good service and a good price but at the moment I can not recommend using them.

Update: At least they are now recognising some problems according to this article.

Just a quick warning that if you are considering taking out membership of Friends Reunited that the £7.50 only buys you 6 months instead of the original 12.

I took out membership to contact friend who contact me but did not realise that if they did not include there email address in the message I would have to pay to reply. This I can just about cope with, and I can just about cope with the price increase that is just over my comfort level for squandering on a web service, but in my mind the way the that the 12 months has just been halved and all references to the duration bar one not changed but removed from the site is dishonest.

In reality I do not need membership for 12 months but I do feel strongly that I have been conned never the less, and this is not what ITV should be doing to revive the web service. More information about this is on the Guardian Unlimited web site here and here where free registration is required.

Finally if you would like to contact someone through Friends Reunited in the next few days, don’t take out membership, just ask me to pass on you email address for free.