Since I began working in SEO around 3 years ago, I’ve worked with a number of hosting companies and really struggled to find a good one – until now! Having found South West Broadband.
123-Reg, my previous hosting provider are quite simply the worst company I’ve ever dealt with – that’s not limited to hosting providers! After migrating my personal website to them at the start of November, I quickly noticed that it was offline around 50% of the time and took around 30 seconds to load when it was accessible. Submitting constant support tickets and making loads of phone calls generated the following responses:
- Our unlimited package cannot handle heavy installations like WordPress
- Of course we can handle WordPress, it must be something you’re doing
- I think it was a glitch with our servers, it should be resolved now
- You need to provide us with ping responses (which I did a number of times – without a resolution)
- It seems fine to us
- It’s fixed now, we’ve resolved it (They hadn’t realised I’d moved hosting provider)
Their customer service was poor, the majority of my support requests were followed by excuses and links to random articles that were generally irrelevant.
Then, after leaving the company, things got even worse as they refused to provide me with a refund – despite destroying my rankings and constant downtime! It took between five and ten support tickets and one very angry phone call to actually get my money back!
As I mentioned earlier, I would strongly recommend South West Broadband as they’re honest, approachable and extremely hard working.
I would strongly recommend staying as far away from 123-Reg as possible!!!
19 Responses
I am having the same issues with 123-reg at the moment and reading you’re post is like deja vu. I have had slowness with my wordpress site for around 4 months and I first notified them a month ago, I thought I had configured WordPress incorrectly but after reading this I am more convinced than ever its something at their end.
Glad to see you got it sorted. I am still chasing a refund though.
They’re an absolute nightmare – would recommend leaving them!!!
Comment
I’m way ahead of you. My site is now hosted with the folks at SWBroadband and my site is really fast now. After reading this post I followed them, I signed up yesterday afternoon and my sites are back up and running by 8am this morning. So I second your recommendation about SWBroadband. I don’t think 123-reg would have setup my site at 7.30pm on friday night!
That’s great – they were the same with me, sorted everything out within a few hours. I don’t understand how 123-Reg are still trading, everyone seems to have the same stuff to say about them!
Great post Paul, you have mirrored exactly what is happening to me. I have been looking at our wordpress site thinking something is wrong as 123-reg never seem to find anything, run out of patience now.
Cheers and will look at SWb
Dave
I would strongly recommend them – they moved all of my domains, emails and files over the same day and they even tracked down some of my lost domains and re-applied my email forwarders for me.
123-Reg are terrible, I genuinely don’t understand how they can treat customers the way they do – their customer service team are the worst I’ve ever dealt with!
Good luck!
Paul
I’m always the first to speak up when I think someone has hit the mark, and you’ve done it!
Glad you’ve shared this with people. I’ve spoke with many people who have also had this issue.
Thank you for sharing.
Useful post – almost signed up with them myself, glad I didn’t.
I have had terrible problems with 123-reg. Their customer service is simply awful as they can hardly resolve any technical issue. Most problems I had were related to their webmail system. I was constantly getting ‘time-out’ error messages and at the end the mail simply stopped working. I was often not able to send out any mails (with no indication that these had not been delivered) and mails sent to me were not getting through to my in-box. They couldn’t resolve it even after many complaints so I had to leave them. And, yes, once my site got hacked too. They advertise very widely and thus trap unsuspecting customers. I wish everyone knew their service standards as they are probably the worst hosting company around. I am now with a different ISP and very happy.
I completely agree – their service and CS team were terrible, the worst I’ve ever seen.
Fully agree. I started a business and 123-reg have almost managed to end it. Abysmal hosting speeds, apparently all my fault for using caching, then after umpteen emails they asked why caching is off! Then they moved me to faster servers, the said if it doesn’t improve they may have to move me to their faster servers! I can’t even get a backup of my site as they run old versions of php.
I still have no website aft weeks and weeks as its too slow to upload to and I’m pulling out what little hair I have left.
I’m also amazed they are still in business, a complete bunch of clowns in a mickey mouse company, and that’s a big injustice to Mickey Mouse.
Yes 123-reg is a complete joke!
They kept messing up my domain and would come back with a support ticket to fix what THEY broke, they’d tell me it would take 4 days to resolve the issue, then after 3 days the support ticket would close automatically and i’d receive an email saying obviously the issue was resolved thanks to them. The following day i’d have to open the ticket again. Infuriating doesn’t quite cover it…….
They’re still at it in 2013….
We’ve been with them on shared hosting since the middle of May. We were preparing our corporate web site, which has WordPress running an e-commerce solution at the front end and a PHPBB Forum styled to look like part of the same site.
Constant down time! 0nly running 50% of the time and when it is running, we have the same atrocious connect times that you described above. When the domain is first called from DNS we get an 83ms connect (last time we pinged it), then it’s 30 to 40 seconds before the server sends any data. The worst time has been in excess of 2 Mins before their server sent any data.
They keep blaming us and they have a different excuse every time… now they’ve come up with the ridiculous claim that the Timthumb plug-in which creates image thumbnails on our WordPress site is to blame. That claim is of course complete and utter hogwash, because; it also does that lag on connect if you go direct to the forum, where that plug-in isn’t running at all.
Their latest claim is that if we move onto one of their VPS’s it will cure all the problems. Of course I suspect this is just a scam to extract more money. I’ve heard the same thing from other people, who then upgraded to find it made no difference at all.
They’re a pack of thieves and liars and incompetents!! I have to agree that they really are the very very worst company I’ve ever dealt with. Even BT are not this crap and that’s saying something!!!
I so wish we’d seen more of this sort of comment before we signed up to them. We’re cutting our losses and moving elsewhere right now.
Best Regards,
Purple Bob.
Hello there! This post could not be written any better!
Reading this post reminds me of my good old room mate!
He always kept chatting about this. I will forward this write-up to him.
Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thank you for
sharing!
I could not agree more with the negative here about 123-reg. I have had a number of issues with them for the past year, they are very quick to declare they are perfect, great value for money and professional, but sadly the facts belie these claims. Two months ago I logged in to my account on their secure site and advised in writing that I was cancelling all my domains, etc. with them, and asked for confirmation. A few days afterwards, I required them to acknowledge receipt of that cancellation of services, and told them NOT to go to my credit card for the quarterly billing. This was stated as all received by 123-reg. Today, some two months later, I receive an email from 123-reg advising they had taken another quarterly amount for these cancelled domains, etc. from my credit card. Using their “online chat” they declare that only THEY can cancel the domains, web hosting, etc, etc, and that I had to telephone their Customer Relationship team to do so. I have made clear the matter appears contrary to Misrepresentation Act and Fraud Act, and that legally they CANNOT demand that contract may only be cancelled from their side ignoring the other side. (Contract Law: privileges enjoyed by one side of a contract must be available to the other side).
They clearly had wind of my online comments a few minutes before, didn’t try to discuss and simply stated “all are now cancelled, the fees will be repaid to your credit card in a few days time.”
I am a former police officer, I appreciate in others and take pride in myself for being honest, ethical and professional. Given my experiences, THERE IS NO WAY IN THE WORLD I WOULD EVER RECOMMEND 123-reg, or use their services ever again.
123-reg are a complete disaster if your website is important to you!
OK – 123-reg sucks – BECAUSE:
As it turns out, the default settings on the server are for log files to grow infinitely. Not being a server guru, I would never guess that something like that needs to be set differently from the default setting. Needless to say, after a few months the logfiles are so huge that the server stops running. I open a support ticket, but after several hours no response. I have to wait until 9:00 AM until the support phones are answered. Fun enough now? All day, the server is not working, tickets are answered only after lengthy phone calls or harsh messages on 123-reg FB page. More fun. The evening rolls around and I am informed that the admins have gone home and will look at this in the morning. that means by morning the server will have been down 24 hrs and they will only START trying to fix it. That is not support, that is a complete disaster. Not for 123-reg. They have lots of unwitting customers. but for a small business like mine, (I am hosting other websites) it is the kiss of death.
DO NOT USE 123-reg if you really need your server to be on line.
the really funny thing? the last support person I spoke with (Luke) told me that the server isn’t actually off line, it’s just that it isn’t working. Unbelievable!
OK, off to find more review site to warn people.