Following some very irritating problems with 123-Reg and its parent company Pipex, which, it turns out stem from the company trying to consolidate and cut costs – I have started shifting my domains to another company.

Who’s the other company? Well, thanks to reader Andrew, it is Heart Internet. Heart Internet is set up by the same two blokes, Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford, that set up both WebFusion and 123-Reg and have sold both of them on.

There’s clearly an interesting story there but it looks as though Brealey and Beresford live for the entrepreneurial buzz and so have set up yet another company offering high-quality, simple, low-cost domain purchase and hosting. And my experience of the company so far has been good.

Money-saving spree

The good thing as well is that Heart is trying to attract new business by making some money-saving offers. So transfer across your .uk domains for free and they’ll renew it for a year for 9p. And shift your coms, orgs, infos etc for £5 and they renew it for a year. So I’m saving £5 on .uk domains and £1 on the other domains and I’m getting out of 123-Reg before it crashes and burns.

I’m taking it slow and in stages though. I didn’t realise how many domains I now have: 26 in fact. Not exactly a domainer, but a healthy total nonetheless. I shifted an as-yet unused .co.uk domain and it all worked smoothly. Then I shifted over three more unused domains – a .info, .org and .biz – which didn’t work because I realised I hadn’t lifted the domain lock and two of them actually had out-of-date contact info on. So I changed that, emailed Heart Internet and then ran it through straight away and the SRS emails arrived about two minutes later.

I’m waiting for that to still go through but so far it all looks fine. The big step will come in shifting a domain I’m using. I may have to play a bit more with what Heart offers but so far it looks good. Its hosting deals also look good but it doesn’t have cPanel so I can’t use my favourite Fantastico feature which lets you install a variety of open-source programs with just a click of a button (I *love* this tool – why on earth isn’t there an open-source version of it out there? It is so transparently the future for hosting companies).

Heart Internet’s hosting deals are also good and very cheap. In fact, they are better than the hyper-competitive US market in many ways. I may try them out. Certainly much better value that WebFusion – which I had my argument with Pipex over. And presumably Heart Internet won’t try to charge your credit card for a renewal before it sends you an invoice and several weeks before that invoice is even due. Pipex’s response btw has been to continue to send me occasional emails. I wonder how long this will go on before they bother to actually check their own records.

Downsides

What’s the downsides with Heart Internet? Well, it doesn’t feel as secure as 123-Reg to be honest. With 123-Reg, you log-in and there you are contained within your control panel area. Also 123-Reg won’t let you have anything but a very advanced password – a random mixture of numbers and letters – so you have to rely on a cookie to get in. The entry also comes in a pop-up window.

Now, normally on the Net these measures bother me, but when it comes to the control panel for more than 80 percent of the domains I own and run (not all the domains are mine, I run sites for a few people), I like the fact that it is slightly difficult to get in.

In comparison, with Heart Internet, you jump in and out of the secure site as you navigate the site, and the password is not as secure, and there’s isn’t a pop-up password entry box. Now I have put on my engineer’s hat and I can see that the security risk is only slightly greater with Heart’s approach, but even so, by jumping in and out of a secure site on simple clicks, the risk is greater. And, of course, the convenience of a password you can remember is one thing but when it comes to my domain names, I would prefer the inconvenience of a harder password.

Recommendation

I am getting over these concerns slowly but they are still playing on me and they are the reason I haven’t shifted more domains at this moment.

I think Heart Internet’s website is actually better and clearer than everyone else on the market. But even so, I would prefer to have to sense of logging into the site and entering into a site where I then have to step out of again.

That aside, so far, I can heartily recommend Heart Internet. It is simple, it works well, it is cheaper, customers service so far has been outstanding, and it has a good pedigree behind it. I am moving and Pipex only has itself to blame.

Pipex is one of the UK’s biggest Internet companies and it appears to be on a determined route to self-destruction. I have already started shifted my domains and hosting deals.

I’m not a business journalist so I haven’t really bothered to follow Pipex’s business, although they do appear to be going for the bulk mainstream audience of Internet users. And the result for my perspective has been that the very best company in the UK for domains – 123-Reg, which is now owned by Pipex – has gradually been destroyed by corporate shenanigans.

I first wrote about 123-Reg’s problems two months’ ago. I got a nice call from Pipex’s PR people and was assured that everything was fine but you need only look at the continued stream of comments on the blog post to see that if anything the situation is getting worse.

But the past week has shown that the problem really does lie with Pipex the parent company.

I have a range of hosting accounts, and one of them is (or rather was) with Pipex.

I received an email last week from Pipex stating: “Dear Kieren McCarthy, We have today tried to process a payment for services hosted with us, using the card, last 4 digits xxxx, securely held on file. Unfortunately we have been unable to complete the transaction due to the following reason…”

This email was followed literally one minute later with an invoice from Pipex for the web hosting deal: “Please find attached the Invoice relating to your Webhosting and/or Domain Name Renewal/Registration…”

Now there are several things here that I *really* don’t like. One, Pipex did not tell me the hosting was about to expire, it simply tried to charge my credit card. And it tried to charge it before informing me or sending an invoice. Not only that but it tried to take payment on 24 November when it was due on 1 December – and when I should have 30 days to pay anyway. This is outrageous behaviour.

But that wasn’t why I shifted my account. I shifted it because Pipex’s hosting deal is rubbish. They want £105.69 for a hosting deal you can buy anywhere else for literally half the price. So that’s what I’ve done – shifted to Bluehost.com, who offer more than the Pipex deal for half the price. It’s no wonder Pipex is trying to charge you first and ask questions afterwards. I see it as extremely fortunate that my credit card was stolen so I got a new card and Pipex wasn’t able to rip me off for another year.

But it gets better. I replied to the email with the invoice on saying I had decided to take my business elsewhere – and explained why as well. This morning – a week later – I received this email:

Thank you for your email. Our Customer Service team deal with the closure of accounts and they can be contacted on 0115 9170000, option 6 (9.00 – 5.30pm Monday to Friday).

Please contact them regarding this query to begin the 30 day notification which is required for the closure of all accounts as per our terms and conditions.

In fact, I had tried to find a way of cancelling my order online and was unable to. I had mentioned this in my email. So, to recap:

• Pipex tries to charge your credit card a week before an invoice is even due
• Pipex doesn’t supply you with a way to cancel your account
• Pipex then says you have to give it 30 days’ notice to close any account

This is really just a scam. This is the company that Pipex has become. And it is dragging 123-Reg down with it. Can some tech-heads please set up a new 123-Reg and then email me about it? I am in the market for shifting domains.

My response to Pipex’s email was blunt:

I’m sorry but I consider replying to the email that I was sent with the invoice is sufficient response to Pipex.

You are welcome to have whatever convoluted internal structures you like, but as a now ex-customer, you won’t find me playing along. As far as I am concerned our business dealings are over and completed.

Yours sincerely, Kieren McCarthy

We’ll see how unpleasant Pipex wants to be about this. The more unpleasant they are, the more they will live to regret it.

There is something seriously wrong with 123-Reg – previously the best domain purchasing company in the UK.

Today, I have moved my JaysonBlair.com domain and hosting deal from them for the simple reason that… the website had completely disappeared! The hosting deal must have come to an end and yet somewhere, somehow it fell through the cracks and 123-Reg failed to tell me. I was so gobsmacked I have shifted everything over to GoDaddy.

This isn’t the only time I’ve had trouble with 123-Reg recently either – and I can see from looking on the Net that I’m not alone.

123-Reg’s support – ever since Pipex took them over, and then again recently while Pipex is going through some strange changes – has gone from bad to absolutely pointless.

I had to kill my blog with them and shift hosting because they were so completely useless and unhelpful. I hit a bandwidth limit, but rather than be informed, they just killed it. I was happy to pay for more bandwidth – which I did – but it didn’t work and they basically said they didn’t care. So I moved my hosting.

I also shifted the hosting for my Sexdotcom.info site, because they were so unhelpful and so restrictive with their hosting deals. And I don’t think I’ll bother renewing my hosting deals for my other sites when they come for renewal either (assuming of course that 123-Reg bothers to tell me).

It’s not just me and it’s not just hosting either. There is an extraordinary post on the influential UK mailing list at Deleting.co.uk entitled “R.I.P 123, is this the end for 123-reg?” The complaint was very worrying: “I registered a domain several hours ago with 123-reg.co.uk, the money was taken, yet the domain is still not registered. Anyone can go and register it.”

And again on the My Two Cents blog, Shari says, no, shouts “BOYCOTT 123-REG.CO.UK!” She has also shifted over to GoDaddy because: “My password needed to be reset since early June so I could renew a domain for my husband! And what happens?? 3 MONTHS LATER and the LOSS of my husbands domain to finally get it reset!!! Talk about BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE! I emailed them several times a day since June and FINALLY 2 weeks ago they reset my password… but 2 MONTHS TOO LATE!”

Something has gone very, very wrong at 123-Reg and it is directly impinging on its core technical functions. What a way to squander a reputation. I’m simply not going to stay with a company that I can’t trust to look after my domains or hosting deals.