Following on from my earlier post, here is an explanation of what happend a couple of weeks ago and why rossbrown.net was unavailable for a few days.
When I first registered this domain back in 2000, I foolishly used UK2.NET as they were the cheapest. I since tried to migrate the domain to a different host, but found UK2 did not respond to my requests. I kind of resigned myself to the fact I would have to host with them for another 12 months, until I could sort out the migration, so I stumped up the £12 or so for another year and thought that was the end of it. Closer to the cut-off date, I received a warning via email that my domain was about to expire, despite me having paid the renewal. This made me wonder whether UK2 had received payment, so I checked by logging in to their site and viewing my details. Sure enough, it was showing PAID, so I made a mental note to keep an eye on things.

On the big day, I found out to my cost that UK2 had cocked up the renewal and my domain had been put on hold by TUCOWS / OpenSRS (the actual registrar - UK2 are just a reseller). Naturally, I tried to contact UK2 to get them to sort it out, but had no success at all in doing so.

I have since found out that the entire UK2 operation consists of nothing more than a few cgi scripts hosted on servers in London Docklands. They offer NO support, you cannot email or telephone them and whenever you try to contact them you always get sent back to their “friendly” help pages and FAQ. Not too clever when you need something fixing, since the information is next to useless. In the end, I did manage to find a mailform on the website, but I am still waiting for a reply. They did used to have support forums, but they were full of people moaning about the terrible service that UK2 provide, so unsurprisingly they were taken down.

In the end, I contacted TUCOWS directly, explaining the situation. They were very helpful and gave me a way out - re-registering the domain with another host would transfer it across and give me another 12 months. The one drawback was the Admin contact email address would need to be changed to my address, since it was showing hostmaster@uk2.net. To do that, I had to fax some photo ID along with a form to TUCOWS, but it was pretty painless. I also contacted TUCOWS’ compliance people, complaining that UK2 were not giving me adequate service.

In the end, my domain was transferred to a new host and I have another 12 months left to run. I am also completely free of UK2 (I transferred my other domain away from them too, neverhappy.com) and I will never use them again. They don’t deserve the business.