Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

For those of you living in the UK, you may have heard of 123-Reg which are one of the biggest registrars in the country - with lots of customers.

Their prices are low and like most companies, they have a control panel for you to maintain your DNS and other details.  Personally I don’t use them, and never have because I prefer the more comprehensive service of GoDaddy.com. 

But after buying an existing domain name from another person - who had it registered with 123-Reg, getting it transfered should have been a straight forward process.  I can only comment from the GoDaddy control panel, but the idea is that you make the transfer request, an email gets sent from GoDaddy to the administration contact for the domain with a Transaction ID and password inside the email.

The administrative contact then needs to supply those to the new buyer - and also the Authorization Code or EPP code from 123-Reg.

Not having had access to the 123-Reg control panel, I knew the authorization code was needed, but the person I was buying off said there wasn’t one.  In the end, and after searching Google for a while, I found the problem, and the solution.

Whereas 123-Reg make it very easy to move your domains to them, they don’t want you to move elsewhere and even their FAQs omit this common question of “how do I move my .com domain away from 123-Reg”.

The solution is to create a support ticket asking something like “please supply me with the EPP code or Authorization Code so that I can transfer my domain to another registrar”.  Depending on when you make the request, you may have a 24+ hour wait for the reply.

Why companies make it so hard to move their domains away I don’t know.  When someone wants to leave or transfer their services away, they’ve obviously thought it through and made their decision.  Making it harder to move away is only going to frustrate them more and never come back - or even make a blog post!