Domain Name Hosting

How long have you got? :-)

Long time ago they were ok, but they don't seem to know what they are doing half the time. The mail platform was crap, then they improved it, and now it is worse! (might be ok for a single domain, but hopeless for multiple of business use). The migration from the previous platform was a shambles and they rarely did what they said they were going to. Tech support is frequently like a back pocket on a sock. Their shared hosting has actually improved a bit in recent years, but it is still a bit inflexible.

So in short I still use them for some services, but don't generally rely on them for anything new. Not that cheap either any more.

It was 123-reg who I was using. I had used 123-reg for many years and they were excellent. Then Go Daddy took over and things started to go downhill. Every year they increased one of their price elements and at the same time service deteriorated.

UPDATE

Thanks for all the recommendations for Mythic-Beasts.

Yesterday I set up a MB account and transferred my domains to them. MB provide very clear instructions on how to effect the transfer and how to set up the DNS etc. With the exception of having to resort to my old hosting company to name MB as the new hosts, all the rest was ticking boxes on the MB dashboard to confirm that you want to use their DNS etc. A very painless transfer process.

Simples.

The whole process took about 10 minutes. Now been running overnight and so far no problems detected.

I was with 123-reg, but since Go Daddy took over, prices has increased and service had gone downhill.

... They never miss an opportunity to "upsell", I had a friend call me last night, he uses 123 to register a domain and forward email to a mailbox elsewhere.

They had emailed him to get him to buy their "professional email service", which would cost him £35/year and let him do exactly what he already does with the basic forwarding included in the price of his domain ... it was phrased as though he was "renewing" a service he had asked for ... quite scummy.

That is exactly what made me jump. They only mentioned one domain but I think it is £35/year for each Domain.

It was the GoDaddy takeover of TsoHost that started their deterioration too!

Yes, exactly my experience.

or to claim something you bought was in fact a free service, so it was fine for them to take it away (not helped by little institutional memory of what services they offered in the past).

At one time, if you wanted mailboxes you had to buy a web hosting package, and that included a bundle of mailboxes. Every package you bought came with more mailboxes - even if you did not need them. Buy a higher end package and get 100 mailboxes. However the names were hard coded - so if your 123 login name was say "flobble", then you would get mailboxes called "flobble-1"... "flobble-n". Add another hosting package and the next batch would follow the last number of the previous etc. Now most companies don't have many people called flobble, so you would have to setup a forward so that that Mike the MD can have an email address like snipped-for-privacy@somedomain.com, but mail would get delivered to the flobble-19 mailbox.

Skip forward a bit and they add the capability to create mailboxes with a user selected name. They start calling the older type "legacy" mailboxes. If you cancel a hosting package, they delete the associated "legacy" mailboxes. Tricky when you have bought many packages over the years, now have a stash of 900 mailboxes attached to your account (most not used), and don't actually know what batch of mailboxes will vanish when the hosting account is ceased. Bit like russian roulette with (customer's!) mailboxes.

Then a bit later they nag you because you have too many forward rules on your account - ignoring that it was their initial daft setup that forced the behaviour. Then you highlight that their mailboxes timeout, and they say it is because you have too much in them (again there were no quotas specified or enforced initially), they add one retrospectively, and now mail system (lack of) performance is your fault for having a 5gig in a mailbox that is only supposed to take 1G. But you can't complain because it is a "free" mailbox. If you pay individually for a business mailbox you can have more!

The final straw was on the new mail platform where they decided a maximum limit of 50 forward rules. Not per domain, but per account! Note ideal when you have 70+ domains hosted with them, and most customers would like to have at least a "sales@" style address. (in reality it turned out that the new system supports alias addresses that can redirect to other addresses in the same domain - but they did not actually mention that before the migration).

excuse the rant...!

And Heart Internet :-(