UK domain registrar 123-Reg crashes and burns, taking its customers with it
If you've tried to reach Alfresco's web site in the past day (Oh, come on! You know you have!), you will have been disappointed. There's nothing there (See right).
Alfresco, among many others, uses 123-Reg as its domain registrar, and 123-Reg is down. Completely. Calls to 123-Reg's technical support have gone unanswered.
123-Reg is owned by Pipex, one of the UK's leading ISPs (and has been for a very long time). It may be a denial of service attack. Or it may come from complete and utter ineptitude on 123-Reg's part.
Either way, for companies whose business depends on the Internet, it's inexcusable.
123-Reg promises 100% uptime, but the company doesn't have a great track record. In 2002 its DNS servers got mangled, leaving its customers without email.
Then again, maybe signing up for the "cheapest and easiest way to get a domain name" is a recipe for this kind of disaster. Bozos.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I have 2 websites with these and one is due to launch with a print advertising campaign on Monday, they better be up and running by then!
At present, we have engineers looking into this as a matter of urgency.
We first monitored them going down at about 5pm Friday. Who knows what they could possibly be doing for over 24hrs.... and no update since doesnt give much hope.
I did submit a request for more info via the web form this morning and I have only just received an email conformation so no help either.
Having entered their IP addrss 195.224.48.98 in to my hosts file I was able to log in and point my domains to other dns servers.
Just what you need on a saturday
- by tony_nyorks December 6, 2007 2:00 AM PST
- I have been a customer of theirs for a number of years and I only stay with them because it's better the devil you know.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)Last week I launched a new website only to find that it wasn't appearing on the internet. I went through their support site, got an answer saying the problem was due to a propagation fault which is now fixed and my site should be online Tuesday - it wasn't.
It's now Thursday, they are ignoring my follow up questions and can't get through on the phone.
I have a lot of websites with them and will be moving them all. Useless!!!