Much better than everybody says! (123-reg.co.uk)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	123-reg.co.uk
Date:	25/02/01 (309 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very cheap.

Disadvantages: But not as cheap and they'd like to make out.

Having a quick look through all of the other opinions in this category I can see that most Dooyoo users rate 123-reg.co.uk very lowly. Having just purchased a domain for my new website (www.pudding-face.co.uk) I can quite comfotably say that the service is excellent.

The main complaints made by the majority of Dooyooers is that their adverts are misleading. I would agree with this fact but they're not as misleading as the majority of the other adverts for domain registering companies. A lot of companies claim to offer 'Free domain registration' which up to a certain extent is totally true. It's only true as far as the company itself doesn't charge a penny for registration. You still have to pay naming authority fees and they'll probably rope you into some kind of hosting agreement. Currently 123-reg.co.uk is claiming that you can get .co.uk domains from 49p. The important word there is 'from' because if you buy in large enough quantities you will get them for that price. The truth is that if you buy one .co.uk domain you will end up paying around &7 including VAT for it, which is still a fiver cheaper than companies such as easily.co.uk.

I have no problems or worries registering my domain with this company, primarily because they're based only a few miles from my house. This does give an increased piece of mind and I would much rather order from a company such as this than a faceless mega-corporation.

So, what services do they offer? Well for a start, they'll register a whole host of domains for you. This can take around 24 hours from the time that you place you order, so if I was you, I wouldn't go telling your friends about your domain untill it is all up and running. This is because if your friends so wished, they could register the domain in the interim and you would be left with nothing. Registering the domain is a very simple process. As its name suggests, it's a simple 3 stage thing.
The first stage is choosing the domain that you want. In today's world it is becoming very difficult to get the domain that you realy want because the chances are that someone will have registerd it before you. In this situation my advice would be to try slight variations such as a hyphen if it's a two word domain. I was shocked to discover that someone had already registered puddingface.co.uk and .com so I had to use a hyphen. It's not the ideal situation bit it works.

It's vital to choose the correct domain suffix for the purpose of your website. If you are registering for a company go for .co.uk or .com (bearing in mind that .coms are much more expensive). If you are going for a non-profit organisation go for a .org or .org.uk and if you are a bit unsure, go for .net. The prices differ for all of these domains with .co.uk being the cheapest and .com being the most expensive. New domain suffixes are being introduced currently but it's probably not worth buying one of these yet, or at least not 'till the become widely accepted.

Step 2 in the registration process is entering your chosen domain and select any options that you require. By options, I mean things such as webhosting. I wouldn't reccommend paying for your web hosting unless you need maximum server uptime. Instead use a free web space provider such as www.f2s.com (see my review on them!) and upload your website to there.

The web hosting packages that the company offers are handled by their parent company called WebFusion and this is how 123-reg.co.uk makes their money. They charge about £100 a year for a personal website. This includes a lot of features such as 100Mb of web space but things such as MS Front Page Extensions cost an extra £5. When you consider that F2S offer free 20Mb of web space, cgi-bin and Front Page extensions, paying for web hosting suddenly seems like a waste of money.

Step 3 in the process is simply confirming everythi
ng that you have asked for and prices etc. Now all you have to do is wait a few hours untill your new domain is registered and then you can start using it.

123-reg.co.uk offer a lot of support for their customers in the form of the Control Panel. This is a very simple to use facility that gives you full control over your domain. This allows you to set up the following things:

Email forwarding - This makes all emails to anything@yourdomain.co.uk be forwarded to your primary email account. This is very useful because it effectively gives you an infinite amount of email addresses at your very own domain. Because you can have all of these emails forwarded to your primary account it means that you don't have to spend ages checking all you email accounts so it keeps things simple.

Web Forwarding - This is very useful and means that you don't have to have your website hosted on 123-reg's servers. This essentially means that you can host your site on a server like F2S and your customers or website visitors won't be aware of it. The address at the top of the page appears as your domain still due to URL masking so it is a very practical solution to a long standing problem.

Holding Page - The company will very kindly create a custom Under Construction page for your website whilst you are designing it. All you have to do is give them some details about the aims of your site and when it will be finished etc and a wizard sets up a Flash holding page for you automatically. This saves the effort of having do it yourself although I haven't seen the results of one of these yet.

The other options within the control panel are very boring and technical so I won't bore you with them here. Basically they offer the option to transfer the domain over to another company or a permanent IP address, so the majority of users won't have to worry about this.

My experience with the company has been very favourable so
far. The domain hasn't stopped working yet and I've had no problems with reliability. I looked around many companies when considering where to buy my domain and I feel that I got the best price for a very good service. A couple of weeks prior to this domain purchase I had bought a domain from easily.co.uk and I think that 123-reg.co.uk offers many more features and customisabilty for less money. I have no problems reccommending this company to anybody.

Obviously my experience with this company has been far better than that of other people so I can only hope that the service doesn't get any worse. This service was very easy to use yet it does offer some very advanced features so I wouldn't hesitate in registering more domains with them. If you are considering it though, maybe you should try and find some more of their customers to see what their experiences are, and judging by other Dooyooers, they may not be quite as good.

But as I said, for me, they are a very good company.

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