123 Reg Review 2024: The Good, the Bad & the (Very) Ugly

Not a Lot of Good Things to Say

I was brought up on the saying, “If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all.” Typically, when I’m assigned to do a hosting review, I try to keep a positive mindset so I can provide a fair and balanced opinion. With 123 Reg, however, I was struggling to find something, anything, good to say. And since my bosses were expecting a full review, I couldn’t stick with Grandma’s teachings and say nothing. So here we are.

From the start, my experience with 123 Reg made me wish I’d called in sick for this review. Basic information that we normally include in our reviews, such as data center locations and phone support hours, were nowhere to be found – either shrouded in secrecy or hidden in FAQs. Then came the trainwreck experience of actually using 123 Reg’s services. Things were so bad at one point, I had to cancel the account and start all over again.

Granted, its performance scores were surprisingly good, but I had so much trouble getting my site online it was hardly worth it. What good, after all, are fast loading speeds when you can’t get your domain and your hosting package connected?

My overall opinion is that it’s a good thing I didn’t have to rely on 123 Reg for hosting. If you’re looking for an alternative host, I’d suggest looking for one that offers a data center in the UK, outstanding performance scores, an easy-to-use website, nice entry-level plan features, and decent prices. (Most of which 123 Reg doesn’t supply.) In fact, I can recommend 10 top website hosts that can easily provide this, and then some.

Read on to see what went wrong and why I came to my conclusions.

Don’t Expect Much

At first glance, 123 Reg looks like it has some really nice features. After all, it advertises things like free email, domains, and SSL certificates. I did find a couple of things worth praising for their mere existence, such as unlimited bandwidth and daily backups. However, after actually using the service, there were either technical issues or limitations that took the shine right off.

“Free” and “Unlimited” Features

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Judging by the hosting plan descriptions, you’d think that 123 Reg offered some really good stuff for really reasonable prices. See all those tooltips beside the hosting plan features? That’s where the “fine print” hides. Free domain? Looks good, until you realize you can only get a free domain if you register a .online TLD. Free email? Only if you pay for a yearly plan. Free SSL? Not if you purchase the entry-level Economy plan.

Unlimited bandwidth? Ah, but there’s a catch. You’re advised under 123 Reg’s Acceptable Use Policy that using high volumes of bandwidth can get your account terminated without warning. While this practice is pretty standard, most hosts are more forthcoming with it instead of hiding it in documentation few users actually read.

In contrast, many competitors don’t limit their free features. For example, Hostinger’s free domain offer includes 24 different TLDs, including .com. InterServer provides unlimited emails1 with its monthly payment plan. Both include free SSLs. They also add other valuable free features, such as InterServer’s proprietary InterShield security suite and Hostinger’s AI website builder – and that’s with their entry-level plans.

Daily Backups

One thing that 123 Reg does right is offer daily backups with all its plans. Many hosts, including Hostinger, only offer weekly backups with their budget plans. 123 Reg will store your daily backups for 7 days. Or at least that’s what the site says.

Whenever I accessed my Backups dashboard in my cPanel, there was only ever one backup available. Depending on the time of day I checked, it was either from that same day or from the day before. Perhaps another issue with purchasing a monthly plan? Or the Economy plan? We’ll never know because support couldn’t tell me why. (We’ll get to support in a bit, another disaster all on its own.)

Managed WordPress Option

While I didn’t test our WordPress site on 123 Reg’s managed WordPress hosting, it’s an option I need to mention. There are three plans that are only a bit more expensive than the shared hosting plans – as long as you only want to host one site. You’ll pay significantly more to host more than one.

The same limitations with domains and email accounts also apply here. Daily backups become “Regular Backups” with no explanation of what that means. In the very least, the managed WordPress plans do give you access to a free SSL, CDN, and malware scanning. The plans also include more storage, from 30 GB to unlimited.

Features at a Glance

When It Works, It’s Great… When It Doesn’t, It’s Bad

In all fairness to 123 Reg, when its website works, it’s not a bad experience. The issue I found is that many things are either terribly glitchy or not user-friendly at all. I’ve tested many hosts and never had this much trouble setting up an account as I did here.

Creating a New Account

There are two major issues with 123 Reg’s account signup. The site requires you to receive a text message to verify your new account. There are no other options, just a text message. The first week I tried to sign up, the texting function was down and I was eventually told to use WhatsApp instead. This issue has since been resolved. How do I know? When I had to start all over again with a second new account, the texting function worked fine.

The second issue is evident in the screenshot above. When you create your account, 123 Reg automatically registers you for its marketing emails. You have to click that slider over to decline. This may seem petty, but I don’t like having to opt out of marketing from a service I’m already using. It’s as bad as preselected upsells during the ordering process, if you ask me.

An annoying but not serious issue occurred when I chose not to accept all of 123 Reg’s cookies. It’s a pretty common thing, right? You can choose which cookies you want to allow. 123 Reg gives you that option, but if I chose anything other than “All Cookies,” the online chat function went away! So if you have any potential future need for immediate support help, just bite the bullet and accept all the cookies, I guess. Needless to say, none of this made a good first impression.

Connecting a Domain and Setting Up WordPress

Setting up WordPress with 123 Reg is a no brainer, as my plan automatically came with the platform preinstalled. Nowhere on the website or plan description is this explained, so it was a nice surprise not having to manually install it.

Connecting a domain, however, was an ordeal. I intended to use an older domain that I owned, parked at a third-party registrar (silly me…). That’s when the trouble started. I followed all the steps in 123 Reg’s Support Center documentation – which, it turns out, wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand.

After three days of encountering this screen, I contacted 123 Reg’s technical support – which, it turns out, also wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand. (See the Support section for all the gory details of that experience.)

So, on the advice of support, I reset the account and started all over again with account number two. Still didn’t work. In the end, I had to cancel that account (which in itself was a 10-step ordeal all on its own). Then, I had to buy a 123 Reg domain and another Economy hosting package. This time, 123 Reg automatically pointed my 123 Reg domain to my hosting account. Imagine that.

Contrast that with top hosting providers for multiple domains that I’ve had the pleasure of testing. None of them had any issues connecting my third-party domains. They all had clear, concise instructions in their knowledge bases on how to point your DNS to their server. And none required me to buy a domain through them in order to do so.

Account Control Panel

Once I finally had a hosting plan that I could actually use, I discovered that 123 Reg’s account dashboard is very easy to use. Domains are at the top, hosting comes next and, should you have them, all your other products appear below this.

Your hosting control panel gives you access to cPanel. There are two ways to access your WordPress dashboard, either via cPanel or through the “Edit Site” link right under your site’s URL. Pretty straightforward, all things considered. Compared to Hostinger’s hPanel, however, 123 Reg’s control panel is cumbersome and looks old-fashioned.

I have to add that while trying to access my control panel through my profile menu, I received a 404 error several times stating that no such account existed. Just another problem with 123 Reg (insert long sigh here…).

WordPress Help

This may qualify as a Support feature, but while we’re on the subject of the control panel, we might as well discuss another somewhat helpful feature: the WordPress Help center. You can access the WordPress Help Center right from your account dashboard and it walks you through the essential steps to set up your WordPress site, from choosing your theme template to creating your navigation menu.

The WordPress Help Center is essentially a list of links to articles in the Support Center. I will admit that I did not verify if every link was any more helpful than the “connecting a domain” article. However, even if the 123 Reg articles prove useless, they at least have a list of tasks that you can Google to get your first WordPress site up and going.

The Good, Finally

One of the main reasons we test service providers for Website Planet is so that you can get a real sense of how these web hosts perform in the real world. When it comes to 123 Reg’s performance, I finally have something good to discuss. Sort of.

We use GTmetrix to test loading speeds from servers all over the world. We also use UptimeRobot to test reliability. For the first 11 days, UptimeRobot couldn’t access my site. Its live chat agent had no idea why. I contacted 123 Reg support chat and they also had no idea. Then suddenly, within a few hours, the issue resolved itself. So, I have great test results to report. As with everything 123 Reg, it just took some time to get there.

GTMetrix Performance Tests

My site’s fully loaded time for an entire week of testing never got any faster than 1 second. And there was at least one monitor that registered a loading time of over 1.5 seconds. Compared to many of our other budget UK hosts, 123 Reg’s 1.1 seconds is pretty good – but still not as fast as the top provider on that list, Hostinger.

GTMetrix Global Testing

For our global reach testing, we use several servers in the US, several in Europe, one in South America, and several in Asia and the Pacific region. The only locations that didn’t score an A were Australia, Germany, and Virginia, which sits on the US East Coast. Australia and Germany received a C grade from GTmetrix, with response times of 2.7 and 2.5 seconds, respectively. The server in VA got a B with a 2.3-second response time.

In my experience, most “budget -friendly” hosts score somewhere between 2 and 3 seconds, so 123 Reg is doing better than many of its competition. If your audience is anywhere in North or South America, Asia, western Europe, or the Pacific (with the exception of Australia), you can expect decent loading speeds from 123 Reg.

UptimeRobot

Once we resolved the issue with Uptime Robot, 123 Reg surprised me once again by returning a 100% uptime result. After nothing for 11 days, I had lost hope that I’d be able to report anything at all and figured it was another 123 Reg “thing” to have to deal with. It’s nice to know the host isn’t all bad. In fact, its performance scores are the only thing that saved it from receiving an abysmal score.

The Very Ugly

123 Reg offers support via live chat (9:00 am to 7:00 pm), phone (8:00 am to 11:00 pm), and its Support Center knowledge base. As we’ve already seen with the domain connection issue, the knowledge base articles aren’t terribly helpful. They often lack important or complete details, or simply link to other support articles so that you have to click through two, three, or even four to finally do what you set out to do.

To be fair, I almost always received prompt help when contacting support. Live chat was online within a few minutes and my longest hold time with phone support was 4 minutes. Quick response time, though, doesn’t make up for what happens once you reach an agent.

My main issue with 123 Reg’s support is its incompetence. The above message is a live chat conversation I had with the agent when I was trying to connect my third-party domain to my hosting account. The agent was unable to help me connect my domain and would have to send my request up the line to the administrators. What support agent can’t help with a simple task like pointing nameservers to a hosting account?

When I raised the issue with phone support the first time, I was simply advised to cancel my account and start over. When that didn’t work and I contacted support a second time, the agent admitted that I probably should just buy a 123 Reg domain to finally resolve the issue.

And this might be another petty issue, but I could never get an agent to fully answer my question about 123 Reg’s servers locations. The most I got was that there’s an email server located in Leeds, UK and another in “the EU,” but that’s as close as I could get to the truth. Either the agents don’t know, or the host is terribly secretive about basic information for some reason. Either way, it doesn’t leave a good (or confident) impression.

Not Worth the Trouble

When it comes to shared hosting plans, my research shows that 123 Reg’s prices are below or on par with many other inexpensive UK hosts. One big difference between 123 Reg and many of the other budget-friendly UK hosts, though, is the features included in its plans.

For what you get, the Economy plan isn’t worth buying, and the Deluxe plan is only truly worth it on a yearly subscription. This will get you a free .online domain, 2 email addresses, 50 GB of storage space, and 25 MySQL databases, with the option to host up to 10 websites. For comparison’s sake, InterServer charges far less1 and offers many unlimited features on its entry-level plan.

There are also standard Linux and Windows VPS plans starting at $5.27, as well as high RAM plans with up to 32 GB of RAM. 123 Reg also offers what it calls Premium Hosting and promises “guaranteed” resources – something you’d hope would be a given for dedicated servers.

And as you know from my setup experience, you can also buy domains here.

Like many hosts, you can save on your plan by choosing a yearly plan, and that’s the only way you can receive some of 123 Reg’s supposedly “free” features anyway. You can pay via Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or PayPal. All services are set up on auto-renew policies, so you’ll need to manually change that in your account dashboard if you don’t want the automatic charge to your card.

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if 123 Reg were giving away its hosting services for free. The lack of features (who doesn’t offer a free SSL in today’s market?) combined with having to pay for a yearly plan in order to receive some standard features can’t make up for a price that won’t break the bank. An inexpensive fee simply can’t outweigh all the issues I had using the service and the lack of help from tech support.