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A few weeks ago I renewed a domain that was coming up to expiration for 10 years with 123-reg for £114.00, it was paid for, we received the invoice stating it was paid - and the control panel expiration date has been updated to 2023.

Yesterday upon receiving an email warning that the domain was due to expire, I thought I better contact them and check that the email was sent in error. It turned out they had 'missed the domain for registration', it expires day after tomorrow and they say they don't know if it can be resolved in time.

This is quit unusual and obviously ridiculous service from them, and although if it does expire we'll probable be able to get it back, all our company emails use the domain so there will certainly be disruption to our business - plus the time I've spent trying to get this sorted already.

Could someone let me know what the best course of action we should take here, is it likely they'll renew it in time and what sort of compensation if any we should ask for?

EDIT

For anyone interested, there's some confusion on their end - they have agreed they won't allow it to go down whilst they look into it. Would have been nice to provide that peace of mind originally, but hey ho.

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  • If it only "expires day after tomorrow", then they've not "missed the domain for registration"?
    – MrWhite
    Apr 15, 2014 at 15:36

2 Answers 2

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If they pay the bill, it gets renewed in time. After that it goes into quarentine, where no-one else can register it, and the current registrar can retrieve it from, for an additional fee (which, if you paid your bills on times, should come out of their wallet).

You say your console says to 2023, and somewhere else it says the day after tomorrow. You might want to check out which one is wrong. If your console is correct, you have nothing to worry about.

I suggest you give them a call, you can explain your situation better and get a more custom service. Keep in kind that even if you don't get an answer you like, keep being friendly! If you get rude, the need for them to help you decreases (I can speak from experience).

You can use something like this as one of the last resorts:
"I have paid my bills on time, this is clearly not my fault. I wish not to resort to legal alternatives, which only wastes both our times" (really make sure it's not your fault)

In the wost case, it does expire, what will happen? Kinda harsh, but it stop excisting, as if it wasn't registred at all.
In case you consider this a mayor problem, you could register another domainname* and make that an alias. In that worst case, you can still access your website via that domain, maybe tell your followers on SM that they have to use they temporarly.

*You will have to do this today, due to the fact that DNS changes can take upto 3 days

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  • We will have down time on our website/emails though? Apr 15, 2014 at 14:53
  • The bill was paid ahead of time Apr 15, 2014 at 14:54
  • If you read my question again, I have called them - they said they 'missed the domain for registration', we over over 60 staff using @ourdomain.com email addresses Apr 15, 2014 at 15:07
  • I'm not really sure when they mean with "missed the domain for registration"
    – Martijn
    Apr 15, 2014 at 15:08
  • Me either - apparently as in they haven't renewed it Apr 15, 2014 at 15:09
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To check you have a genuine concern, you can see the expiry date from a WHOIS lookup query - I suggest you use a service that is unaffiliated with 123-reg to ensure it is not affected by any of their internal databases. For example, substitute your domain name into this URL:

http://www.who.is/whois/yourdomain.com

If you have as you say paid and been issued an invoice/receipt for the domain renewal, but they have not actually renewed it on their end then they will need to do so ASAP in order to avoid disruption to your business, and perhaps you may have grounds for a compensation claim, though you should note that their General Terms of Service which you must have agreed to specify that you must notify them of their failure to provide the service within 14 days of you becoming aware (s4.3) and then their liability including a refund amount is limited to one and a quarter times the amount of the fees paid excluding VAT, so in your case £118.75 (s4.4) - hardly worth the hassle.

Given the risk of disruption to your business in the event of a failed domain renewal I would strongly urge you to do this a month or more in advance to ensure plenty of time to resolve any issues, and to follow-up by checking to ensure they have in fact renewed it. 123-reg are normally reliable but given the potential impact its definitely worth manually verifying the expiry date has been updated. Any automated process can experience problems from time-to-time.

Best thing you can do now is to put pressure on until the domain is renewed, and escalate support tickets to the highest level possible to ensure urgent attention is given to the issue. It's likely that if you've had this problem, it may have affected others of their customers too.

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