Registration and web hosting company 123-Reg has again apologised to customers hit by hardware problems which meant some customers' websites fell offline.

Several irritated customers contacted us to complain that their websites had "disappeared". The sites reappeared again, but 123-Reg decided to use an old back-up. The statement sent to customers said: "To maintain accurate data consistency, we decided to use an older restore."

The email continues: "We know this is not an acceptable level of service, and would like to compensate you for your time by giving you one month's free web hosting. This extra service will be added onto the end of your account."

Customers complained that the company should make daily back-ups and that the system status page on 123-Reg's website continued to show: "System status - There are no system status messages to display" throughout the outage.

123-Reg sent us the following email:

123-reg experienced a short term hardware fault which resulted in a outage between 1st - 2nd March 2007, affecting less than 2 per cent of our customer base.

We have been in contact with those customers affected and offered free hosting as compensation.

The fault has been rectified and customers are back online. We apologise for any inconvenience caused during this time.

123-Reg blamed a flurry of spam emails for problems delivering customer emails in December last year. In January, when more complaints emerged, the company denied it was having any problems. ®