The ISP and domain registrar 123-Reg upset me enough to turn me from an already dissatisfied customer into an angry customer a couple of weeks ago. The disappointing thing is that they had the opportunity to convert me to “quite satisfied” status by simply giving me an explanation that would go some way to giving reassurance, but they blew it by ignoring what the customer was saying and hiding behind their terms and conditions.
Edit 3 Jun: 123-Reg saw this post yesterday and responded giving an explanation and a reassurance that it won’t happen again. The agent did reply 2 weeks ago, but that email never turned up.
It all started four weeks ago when my mobile phone emited the dreaded tap-tap to announce I had a text-message. I dread receiving text messages these days because I don’t get many, and if they’re out of the blue I immediately fear it’s a notification reporting that one of our servers are down (even though it is an extremely rare event); alas the tap-tap was indeed “server down”.
For the sake of staying non-technical our mailserver was offline because a domain name had been deleted. This was 123-Reg’s fault – I had renewed the domain registration more than 3 weeks earlier, received confirmation that renewal was completed successfully (credit card debited too), but something went wrong between 123-Reg and the registrar that they deal with for .eu domains behind the scenes. So while my transaction was successful, 123-Reg’s renewal (with Tucows I believe) was not.
Naturally, I was furious with 123-Reg simply because the downtime was allowed to happen when it could have been avoided. I’m guessing that at the end of the month it looked (to the other registrar) like our .eu domain was not renewed so it was taken offline. I didn’t know any of this until I telephoned 123′s helpdesk and the agent told me I wasn’t the only one to have a problem with .eu domain renewals! And yet once I reported the issue, the domain was restored very quickly (about 24 hours). Clearly the problem was known, but nothing was being done about it resulting in downtime that was definitely avoidable.
I made a formal complaint to 123-Reg. I politely stated the facts and asked for an explanation. I regret suggesting that compensation might be in order – expecting they might refund the renewal fee (which is about £10) as an acknowledgement that they messed up – but no, their reply grasped the wrong end of the stick, somehow they think it’s my fault and for good measure refer to their terms and conditions four times. (I’ll post a copy of the reply in the comments below)
No explanation, no reassurance that they have identified the cause of the problem so it won’t happen again, and an afterthought of an apology after they thoroughly managed to piss me off.
Edit 3 Jun: Yesterday’s email exchange has offered an explanation and a reassurance (which was originally sent a few days after their first response but never received). Might be too late for me but my feedback has been passed to 123-Reg’s product development team so hopefully the renewal process will be improved in the future. I’ll append the reply to the comments for completeness.
The outcome:
I was already a somewhat dissatisfied customer (see comments below) and had transferred out most domains or registered new domains (more than 30) before this issue occured. Registering a domain is cheap but I am an influencer – friends regularly ask me for technical advice including choice of suppliers – previously I just would have listed who I recommend, but 123-Reg have only themselves to blame for motivating me to also list the one that falls into the “definitely would not recommend” category.
If I changed the title to Who should I register a .eu domain with? a few more people might stumble upon this post. Isn’t word of mouth great?
Copy of my original complaint:
This is the reply (which was received 24 hours later). Count the number of references to “terms and conditions”. Like I say in my post, I regret suggesting compensation thinking they might pay back a few pounds for having to hang on the phone because that’s all they honed in on:
And my last response (I haven’t had any reply):
In my original post I eluded to already being a dissatisfied customer. This is the reason why:
You might think that it’s only where your website is hosted that affects speed of website and reliability, but don’t neglect where your domain is registered either…
We use a service called Hyperspin to monitor our webservers’ uptime and alert us as soon as one of our sites go offline for any reason. Two summers ago, one of our domains began being reported offline for 5-10 minutes at a time each day. Everytime we received the alert, we would check the server to find everything looked ok, but the problem was at the nameservers (which were 123-Reg’s) – it’s just that DNS propagation hadn’t reached our connections yet.
When I contacted the helpdesk about it they didn’t offer any explanation – their view was that either the alerts were false or it was a problem at our end. Personally, I don’t think they understood. So we transferred all the nameservers to http://www.DNSmadeeasy.com (highly recommended) or to UK-Dedicated (where we host our servers, also highly recommended). Unfortunately, even though our .eu domain’s nameservers were set to dnsmadeeasy, the billing remained with 123-Reg, simply because there are few .eu domain registrars. I’ll be changing that asap.
angry Dan! like the point about your influence/ power – long live Word of Mouth made even more powerful by you knowing what you are talking about.
Wow! I’m actually angry too! The only thing worse than having a problem (any kind of problem – but made worse when it servery impacts your business) is when the company that made the mistake doesn’t seem to care or respond as actual human beings. Those that realize it’s important for a company to appear “human” and respond to customers that way I think will emerge from this WOM shift much stronger – leaving competition in the dust!
The 123-Reg contact did try to reply 3 days later, but the message never turned up.
We had a brief exchange of emails yesterday and my stance basically remains the same:
Which they seem to have taken onboard:
Ultimately, I don’t think either of us are going to climb down. 123-Reg believes it was my responsibility to check everything is ok. I don’t really remember what I did (I have a feeling I thought at the time it must take a little while for the changes to show up but I can’t recall), but I think it is wrong to take payment and let the customer sort it out and report the issue if there is a chance that the renewal they’re paying for hasn’t taken effect. But hopefully it’ll get fixed.
I came surveylab while doing a search for failed 123 req renewals.
It’s not pleasant for me to discover that 123 reg appear to have done nothing about their failed domains renewal problem. I’ve just had 2 domains fail to renew even though 123-reg were paid and the control panel showed the renewal had taken place. Only by checking nominet and whois, could I see that they had failed to renew my domains. Although, that’s not how I found out for one of my domains – it expired and went down. So 3 years on, and 123-reg still don’t check domains have been renewed. They just blindly tell you they have been.
I am sorry to hear the service hasn’t changed, Graeme. We use an excellent service (in beta) from clicked.net (by UK Dedicated who also host our web-servers). I don’t know if they’re accepting new users but if you want to migrate your domains you could email heldesk clicked.net to ask.
Hope your domains get restored ok without too much loss.