Too many price hikes from 123
With a few hundred domains there I tolerated the earlier price hikes and 123's occasional cockups but now renewals have reached twice what some others charge the price differential is too much. Its a major PITA moving away, partly because the external transfer link at 123 is well buried and their interface is slow but I'm going for it.
Yes the bare .uk is a problem, completely unwanted by domain name owners, just a way to double the cost. It's regarded with skepticism by many web users, they know .co.uk and think .uk must be something dodgy. If you were to get your hands on, say tesco.uk you'd have their lawyers on your doorstep so it's just a tax on smaller or less aware businesses who might find someone else grabbed it but can't afford lawyers. Nominet may have created a potential massive security risk with all kinds of crooks grabbing the bare UK versions of legitimate .co.uk businesses and using them for all kinds of scam. Fact is Nominet screwed up (no surprise there...) and the right way for them to fix it is to provide the bare uk variant to existing .co.uk owners for a nominal fee.
Every domain name owner will have had the scam registrar emails along the lines of "Please get in touch urgently if you have any objection to us selling the .cn and .asia variants of your name to an interested third party". The aim of the scam being to encourage you to buy the names from them. The very least Nominet should do with bare uk is to adopt a similar approach, if not they're at risk of becoming the "scammers friend".
Despite the poor performance, occasional cockup and poor UI the 123reg interface did at least allow me to do everything I needed, some alternative offerings are less flexible but there are ways around that. Moving a .co.uk from 123 involves a few minutes work and saves several pounds a year per domain. That's a cost-effective use of my time. About 2 dozen shifted so far.
Anyway, I must thank forums.theregister for some useful contributions to the discussion and helping me make my decision.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
