123 Reg Review

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Matthew Rogers

Author: Matthew Rogers

Last Updated on March 13, 2022

Overall Rating

Cheapest Plan
£3.49/mo

123 Reg: A quick summary for people with no time (pretty much all of us)

Sadly, in a nutshell, we don’t recommend 123 Reg, for a few reasons with the main ones being security and support. Let’s run through a few problems we found.

Security: This is the big one, they made several headlines over the past few years with numerous hacks, loss of data, accidentally removing entire sites, emails, etc. It’s crazy!

Support: There are quite a few complaints about their support attitude floating around, way too many to ignore. Everything from customers being ignored to very rude responses from the support staff.

Pricing: While you can get the first year at £2.99/mo… the renewals at are more costly than most of the competition.

Basically, what we’re saying is that there are better options out there. For the UK, our favourite web host at the moment is Hostinger. For only £0.99/mo, you get 10 GB of SSD disk space, 24/7 expert support, WordPress optimised setup, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and much more… it’s honestly a no-brainer.

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123 Reg Hosting Review

If you’re a UK based business owner who relies on your website for marketing your products and/or services, then you want to make sure it’s always in tip-top condition. To make sure of that, you have to use a web hosting provider that uses high-quality servers and data centres giving your browsers access to your pages anytime they want to. You wouldn’t want your website to go offline when you and your customers need it most right?

User experience suffers during downtimes and slow loading times. And when your potential customers undergo a bad experience, they are less likely to purchase from you. You lose credibility because poor-performing websites are associated with a poor business. Thus, it is your job to choose the best UK web hosting provider that won’t let you suffer the consequences.

As an agency, we know that it’s hard to find the right provider out there. With our experience and reviews, we can help you choose the best web hosting company. Each and every review will focus on a different provider. In this article, the focus will be on UK’s 123 Reg.

An Introduction to 123 Reg

123 Reg is a company, based in England, started by Tim Beresford and Jonathan Brealey back in 2000. They became UK’s largest domain registrar in 2004. While in 2009,  the company was the first to provide Microsoft 2008 hosting in the said country. As of the moment, they have registered over 3.5 million domain names. In addition, they are the hosting provider of over a million sites. Aside from domain name registration and web hosting services, they also provide virtual private servers (VPS).

It is important to note that the company has been under fire during the year 2016. Negative press stated that during their VPS systems clean-up operation, a coding error resulted in the deleting of data including its customers websites. The maintenance operation was implemented on a virtual private server and it wiped out a lot of websites in one go. The sad part about this is the fact that 123 Reg didn’t have a backup of the data. However, they said they are working with data recovery specialists to restore it.

Pricing

123 Reg offers four packages for its web hosting service. These packages are named “Starter,” “Standard,” “Pro,” and “Ultimate.” The said packages can be seen in the image below:

123reg pricing

Their cheapest package is £2.99/mo for the first year, the renewals are definitely higher after that.

The Starter package gives you one free .co.uk domains. Although this domain will only be free for a year. You can have ten subdomains included in that single domain name. Plus, you can only host one website in one account. The amount of disk space given in this plan totals to 10GB.

The good thing about this plan is it gives you unlimited bandwidth. This means that if you have thousands of website visitors, you can cater to them all.

The plan also gives you one mailbox with an allocated size of 5GB. Email features include anti-spam protection, anti-virus protection, and unlimited email forwarders. It also includes autoresponders which allow you to automatically respond to an email with a specific, customized message. The catch-all emails feature allows you to forward all the messages sent to your domain to another email address.

As for supporting tech to help you build websites, the plan supports PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. It also supports Custom Error Pages, ImageMagick, GhostScript, Zend Optimiser, GD, and RealAudio.

They also offer UK WordPress Hosting starting at £7.99/mo.

Support Options

123 Reg provides a variety of options to contact them for support:

  • Online live chat,
  • Ticket submission,
  • Telephone call,
  • Self-Help Support FAQs, and
  • Twitter

According to their website, their live chat support is available from 9am-7pm on weekdays and 9am-4:30pm on weekends. Their telephone support and ticket support systems are available 24/7. Their self-help Support FAQs gives you access to various guides and videos that helps you get started on their platform.

123 Reg customer support has garnered mixed reviews. Some reviews stated that the company provided a helpful customer support system. Reviews stated that their support team spoke in layman terms and did not use technical jargon that will confuse its users.

Other reviews told that customer support was not up to par. A lot of support tickets were ignored. It took about three days (or even more) for them to answer simple problems. Sometimes, it was necessary to repeat questions and state them in detail for the support team to understand what the customer is asking for.

Pros

Free UK Domain Name

You can have a free .co.uk domain name for free. Although this is limited for a year only, it can still save you some cash… hey, at least it’s something.

Cons:

Getting 123 Reg’s hosting service has way too many disadvantages:

Only One Mailbox

With the Essentials package, you are given only one mailbox. This is very inconvenient especially if you need to have multiple email accounts for a variety of people. For all four packages, you are given only one mailbox per hosting account. So, there’s no option for you to upgrade the plan just to have more mailbox accounts.

Negative Press

The negative press surrounding the company in 2016 is definitely horrifying. If you’re a website owner signed up for their hosting services and your website got swept away all in one go, you’ll definitely have a huge dilemma.

If your website is your only source of income, what would you do? 123 Reg’s mistake during the maintenance process is devastating. You wouldn’t want this to happen to the hosting company you are working with.

Support

Definitely not the best around it seems.

Conclusion

A big fat nope from us, instead go check out Hostinger!