123-Reg takes weekend off
Domain name servers
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Updated Pipex's hosting service 123-Reg suffered a weekend of downtime thanks to broken hardware.
The Reg received emails from many of those hit. One said: "Nameservers have been down for 48+ hours this weekend, loosing [sic] me around £3k across my four more popular domain names.
"No explanation on there [sic] website as to what caused the problems. Bloody ridiculous."
One poster on a hosting bulletin board complained: "The most upsetting thing is that there is NO way to get hold of them... they make you wait an hour and dont answer the phone... they dont answer tickets."
A spokesman for Pipex, which owns 123-Reg, told us the company saw its domain name servers fail on Friday afternoon and got them back online on Sunday morning. He said: "Yes there have been problems relating to domain name servers - we've got new hardware in place now and things should be working fine." The company promised a statement on the problems soon.
123-Reg last suffered problems as a result of the floods in Sheffield in June. In December 2006 it had email problems which it blamed on an unexpectedly large amount of image-based spam.
We'll update this story with 123-Reg's statement when we receive it.
123-Reg sent us the following statement:
123-reg experienced intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16 November and Sunday 18 November. This meant that some customers have encountered difficulties with their domain names during this period.This problem was caused by a combination of excessive loading on the DNS servers and a rare hardware failure. During this time, 123-reg engineers have replaced the hardware and full service has been resumed.
We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience that the outage would have caused and we have begun an investigation to identify the cause of the failure, and any necessary actions required will be implemented without delay. Further information and updates is available from http://www.hosting-status.pipex.net
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COMMENTS
Hmm, I suppose I could outsource my DNS hosting from 123-reg to another provider. Oh, wait -
I already do that. A few years ago I made the decision to outsource my DNS management to to Afraid.org's free services, and now I switch any new domain over as soon as I can after ordering it through 123-reg. You can do this from about 5/10 minutes after the domain name is configured on you 123-reg control panel, and you can preconfigure your domain on your afraid.org control panel in anticipation of the nameserver updates, and then there's pretty much no downtime.
I've got about 14 domains hosted on afraid.org, and they've had precisely one period of (partial) downtime in the past few years I've hosted with them. I like them so much, I subscribe to their premium services. On the contrary, I've had nothing but delayed DNS record updates, shit service, and crap tech support from 123-reg (they STILL wont' let me lock/unlock my .name domain, saying that that feature is 'coming soon' and requiring you to ring them up to ask them to unlock your domain, even though they advise you to unlock your domain to make modifications in the support pages!) Trust me, the only times I've rung them are to ask them to unlock my domain - so I could make the switch for my DNS hosting to afraid.org. Couldn't be happier since I made the change.
That's my little nugget of advice for today...
123-smeg
get outta there guys! we DID HAVE 140 domains there until the weekend shite HIT THE FAN ..and yes most of ours FAILED with the hardware dying at 123 ...and yes the dns has been on the blink for months... my server monitor has been reporting dns outages weekly on a spray of 123 domains on different web servers... Weve left now...taken half already to heart internet (ex 123/webfusion folk) great online interface ...but no tel support :-(
we tried fasthosts but they got hacked recently... and they cant host uk,com/centralnic and they hav ONLY TWO A record options in their dns! eh? so no ftp? no cp? no txt? no spf? why not try zoneedit they say eh?? who??
ah well out of the frying pan ... etc etc BIG doh!
Q: what to do where to go for smb semi-enterprise (ie not TOO expensive but sla'd) mid level domain management with GOOD dns options?
gap i the market? anyone up for tax dodge fund investment... ahem ... maybe not...
Zone Transfers
There are some good security reasons not to allow zone transfers on a free for all basis. There are however no good security reasons to prevent domain managers from opting to manually configur secondary or even third and fourth nameservers as they see fit which 123-reg currrently do. We've asked them on several occasions to allow us to mix 123-reg with other nameservers and been told in wasn't allowed (without any good reason - or indeed any reason ever being given).
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