Why not to use UK2.net

Updated: UK2.net 2 years on on 10/11/2006

Some years ago I received a birthday present in the shape of a domain name. That was when www.elfden.co.uk was born. At the time it was purchased through uk2.net because they were relatively cheap.

Everything went well, for a while, and I extended the domain name to a small hosting package as well. That was when the trouble began. The package lacked various little things like cgi and php. But at the time that wasn’t a problem.

Then came a time when I wanted to move the site. Despite the lack of fax machines in most peoples homes, they wanted a fax. Although we have several PC’s in the house, not one of them had any fax software. I scoured the web and eventually found something that sufficed and sent the fax. I was transferring my domain and hosting to UKWSD (UK Web Solutions Direct). Although the DNS took a while to be transferred, it all went reasonably well.

From there the trouble started! When I wasn’t even a customer anymore!

I was being sent their members newsletters. I tried to unsubscribe, but to do that you had to be a member, i.e. have an account with them. Of course my details had been deleted, and I couldn’t access anything.

I emailed them. Apart from the auto-replies, I didn’t receive anything. Then the following month, another newsletter. So I emailed again, adding in all the email addresses I could think of at the time. Finally a reply, yes they would remove me from their list.

3 months later I received another newsletter.

I started the cycle of emails again.

This same thing happened every few months. Then by the beginning of this year I had had enough. In March over the course of 3 days I received a total of 63 automated responce emails from them, following my attempt to contact them once again. I made a complaint to Trading Standards and sent the following email to them:

To: abuse@uk2.net
CC: stopabuse@uk2.net; abuseisp@uk2.net; postmaster@uk2.net; root@uk2.net; sales@uk2.net; support@uk2.net
Subject: I am being spammed from yourselves.

Dear sirs,

Once again I have been added to your apm list despite repeated requests that
I be removed permanently. I was a customer of yours, but have not been for
several years. Every time you send me one of these ‘spam’ email I have
complained, and my email address has eventually been removed for a short
time, but it appears you are not honouring these removals.

You are in breach of the ‘Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC
Directive) Regulations 2003’ and i would like to formally request that my
email address be completely removed from your system.

Also as you are a UK company I would like to formally request that you send
details of how I can obtain from yourselves a full copy of all information
you hold about myself on your computers. This is in regard to the Data
Protection Act, and I trust this matter will be dealt with quickly.

Thank you for your time

Rich Pedley

Although no reply was received the emails, and so far the newsletters have ceased.

Hopefully this article will not be continued…

Updated: UK2.net 2 years on on 10/11/2006

This entry was posted in Rants, UK2. Bookmark the permalink.

272 Responses to Why not to use UK2.net

  1. JP says:

    how much did you pay for the domain?

  2. Charles says:

    I too am suffering UK2NET’s appalling service.
    This company is shocking.
    Their support staff must be specially trained to totally inefficient and obnoxious.
    One minute my hosting renewal has been accepted, the next it is not.
    Can I get anything done, no, some clown in support is probably and deliberately being obstructive.
    Anyone know the name of the clown who runs this outfit?
    Chas

  3. Suffering for months at the hands of these crooks. I am trying to find out who is behind this outfit that seems to ignore the law and all its customers.
    Does anyone know if the MGN group ( Daily mirroar are behind it ?
    Also seeking anyone who wants to join up and seek compensation from them big time.

    Come on lets stop this crooked firm

  4. Davin says:

    I can’t believe that a hosting company can be so unprofessional and their customer support execs to be such big IDIOTS!

    They not only don’t understand what the issue is – they also try to mock at their customers. What a bunch of rascals.

    I am looking for another host to switch over from these bastards. Any suggestions??

    • Rich says:

      I’ve been using UKWSD for a number of years now. Support is good, though admittedly not as good as when i strted with them – price of success perhaps. But I’m not knocking them, they still reply fairly quickly – and I don’t have to contact them very often at all!

  5. paul says:

    They have not issued working passwords, when you call the accounts number it rings constanly. When you call the sales number you get fobbed off with ‘your next in the cue’ (rings for twenty plus minutes) or “I’ll take your detials – and they’re call you back”. Interesting it is the same person answearing the phone each time I have called the sales department (over 8 times). Dose he think the customers are stupid? – or is he just a front to extract monies from customers in a sham operation. Be aware this is a sham (ie. con artist) run set up. Do not let them obtian your money or like myself you will have been robbed.

  6. mike says:

    UK2 are the worst host ever. Trying to transfer away from them now and it is going to cost me an arm and a leg as I have around 20 domains with them. They dont give the option to just have the domains in account and forward the DNS, you have to pay £17 a year for the privelage of changing dns settings ontop of their other hosting fees.

  7. I too join the long list of people conned, ripped off and treated like dirt by these people. however I continue to fight, warn and advise others. We will stop these people if we all continue and complain and inform government and continue to post..
    Kevin

  8. Web design says:

    I have a dedicated server with UK2, it was hacked twice last week, they were supposed to have reinstalled software on the saturday morning at 1am, me and my clients quietest trading time, they didnt bother.
    8.30 Monday Morning, our busiest day of the week and 2 weeks before christmas and all 150 websites on our server were hacked again due to their incompetence.
    They got it back running for an hour and it was hacked again, this time with viruses.
    24 hours later we are all still offline and havent had a response from my support tickets for over 13 hours, disgusting behaviour, i personally have lost thousands and i dread to think what my clients have also lost.
    I need to sue if anyone has any info?

  9. kevin Fitzmaurice-Brown says:

    I strongly urge all those with complaints about uk2.net to contact Trading standards listed below

    It will help so many others. Note uk2.net have saturated so called complaints and directories to ‘ capture ‘ and lie about their services in retaliatioon to so many complaints beware

    !!! Anita Davis
    Principal Consumer Services Officer
    Trading Standards Service
    London Borough of Tower Hamlets
    Mulberry House(AH)
    Po Box 55739
    5 Clove Crescent
    London E14 1BY

    Tel:020 7364 6687
    anita.davis@towerhamlets.gov.uk

  10. mark says:

    Uk2.net needs to be taken to court.

    What does: FREE SET UP mean?
    How can you set up your domain you want without FREE DNS control?
    There is no mention of DNS control being charged in T&Cs.
    Only in knowledge base, which does not form part of T&Cs is it specified.

    They want to charge for a domain transfer. If you buy a domain, as they claim, then you must have a right to transfer. They should specify clearly they register and keep ot for you on their system.
    Anyone taken this company to court?

  11. Amanda says:

    I too registered a domain name with UK2 and wanted to point it elsewhere, but found that they were charging £17 to manage the DNS. Can anyone suggest a better bunch to register a domain name with, with free DNS management?

  12. Free DNS Management :

    FIRST THING EVER !!!

    NEVER REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN OVER ANY HOSTING COMPANY EVER, THE SERVICE MIGHT BE USEFUL, BUT IT IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SAID, THAT YOU HAVE THE USERID and PASSWORD TO MANAGE YOUR DOMAIN NAME.
    YOU ‘RE RESPONSIBLE OF YOUR DOMAIN NAME – EVEN BOUND BY LAW – AND MAY BE WITHOUT THE POWER TO DO WHATEVER …

    Mydns.com or / and Mydomain.com

    (*) They are a discount register , thus pretty cheap but somewhere limited in national Tld’s, which you can overcome by …

    (**) Foreign (with them not purchasable) or not registered or not transferred Domains on MyDns.com… All you need to do is to point the Name Servers to their infrastructure, (the registrar, not the hosting company), thus manage them as unregistered external domains (** free **, but a little slow, you’ll need some patience….) but free !!! (I manage .in (india) extentions there, purchased over GoDaddy and hosted on our dedicated servers )

    (***) with a 7.95 USD (one year additional domain registration included) you can transfer a domain and issue a nice automated domain transfer to their nameservers.

    (****) either in (**free**,not registered with them or transferred or purchased, once a domain is transferred or bought YOU NEED TO PURCHASE FOR 0USD (ZERO = FREE) a domain transfer management, which is excellent for IP pointing , Mx Records, CNames, etc… (by the way you are able there to manage & change too the name servers if you host with some of those bad and tricky providers, trying to loyalize yourself till end of life over name servers, only they manage, as you do not have any power, better password at the registrar like 1&1 Germans dedicated servers provider (20 or more free domains in the contract, the trap, you have no userid and password, and once you cancel the server with them each domain becomes 65 Euro/Year and you are betrieved and hassled by a domain registrar (who automatically renews asking you to pay, ( if you are German in Germany better you pay ), in my case I just told them, no contrct between us , please place your issue on New York State Court, which for obvious reasons never happened.

    Final considerations….

    I use Mydns.com services since 10 years or more, it works fine, and the seldom times I needed an email contact, guess 2 times for 1000 domains in 10 years it worked.

    I hate their user interface offering to purchase whatever ( for me useless ) service before you get purchased your domain … and I do not appreciate their user interface making you loop around for nothing, but definitively beside those things a common webdesigner would have fixed , the service they offer works finest, no complaint at all.

    A tip for whoever will go there, once you purchased the domain management bundle for 0 USD , so free , (Why do I need to purchase something free ?), disable all forwarding settings , then enter DNS … identify the A Record (in the middle why ? Should be on top) … and enter the IP of the receiving machine, and you’re done.

    2-8 hrs and your domain ressolves properly on your computer, obvious do not forget to setup your domain on your computer / hosting service.

  13. I followed a book mark to your webpage from Themelis Cuiper’s SocialGarden videos of internetbusiness & socialadvertising – you are doing an amazing job as he is pointing towards you? #:-)

  14. ordered a .com from them and ended up with a .co When I tried to cancel they cancelled it but wouldn’t refund me???. Other providers do if you make a mistake or register wrongly. Very disappointed from a company who claim they care about customer services. Spoke to someone called Fokrul who was useless!! Beware!

  15. Another Annoyed Customer says:

    AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!!!

    If you dont like someone, then recommend uk2.net to them!

    These guys should be shut down – their business practices are appalling.

    Their support both the free and fully managed are staffed by people with no knowledge of servers.

    They will lose you customers, and possibly your online business.

    do yourself a favour and pay a bit more for a quality provider.

    uk2.net lure you in with cheap prices and then you are well and truly buggered.

    They have cost me over 2k in lost business in the last month and wiped bespoke web applications/systems worth over 4k – we paid for backups but it transpires these were never carried out despite us having tickets with them confirming this was done.

    No offer of a refund, no apologies, they simply do not give a flying fcuk about their customers.

    The attitude is f you pay me.

    AVOID AVOID AVOID

    • Rich says:

      actually, if they have been that bad, then email their CEO. If the guy is still there that I spoke to, then he should be able to help. Plus it is always nice to be able to moan direct to the man at the top.

  16. Please avoid at all costs.
    As i write they have suspended my site and locked out of my account for sending emails to my legitimate subscribers. I dont know how this will end by my hard won customers are being lost every minute my site remains down not to mention the brand damage.

    I am getting another host, try to salvage what little clients i have left.
    Big mistake to join these people in the first place, dont fall for them like i did.

  17. Ian says:

    Yes I agree they are shyte !!

    Dont bother unles u want loads of hassle

  18. coupons says:

    This is the perfect website for anybody who wishes to find out about this topic.
    You understand a whole lot its almost tough to argue with you (not that I actually would want to…HaHa).
    You certainly put a brand new spin on a subject that’s been discussed for decades. Great stuff, just wonderful!

  19. Alex says:

    They lost my domain! My most valuable domain! And they blaming me! Domain was set up for auto renew and they say I didnt renewed it! What can I do now? Can I get my domain back?

  20. sproggit says:

    Wow, 271 comments… Someone touched a nerve. I can see that comments returned with the initial page load range from 2007 through 2013 inclusive, so I’m turning up 6 years later, but hopefully this is still relevant to people who find this page via a web search.

    I moved to UK2.net about 2 years ago, from 1&1 Internet. 1&1 had been absolutely awful – truly abusive: charges added to my account without notice, incessant spam and, when requested, poor service. Initially it looked as though UK2 were cheaper and the reviews I read at the time were broadly positive.

    So I switched.

    Then the trouble started. First, their quotes and services are brilliantly misleading. Want a domain? You can have one. A second? That too. Want email with the second? Ho ho ho. You’ll pay – through the nose – for that. So if you want a personal web space, say, and also want to run a web site for a local club, charity or association, then you are going to pay a lot to allow that second domain to have email capabilities.

    Their control panel management system remains very poor quality. There is a vast amount of documentation on line today that is completely out of date and utterly incorrect. They seem to have no interest in tidy up their own crap.

    But right now the biggest issue I’m experiencing concerns actual access to a domain they host for me. This is a very-low-traffic wordpress site that is basically a family library of photos and info. It’s personal to us and is more reliable than email for holding data.

    Except, I now want to do quite a bit of work there. Each time I try, I can work on the site for say 10-15 minutes before all access is lost. This has happened 3 times in a row. First time I was told that my IP Address had been blocked. Second was the same story. It happened again last night, so I checked my CPanel and saw no blocked addresses [at least, no explicitly blocked addresses].

    What seems to be happening is that UK2 have implemented some form of traffic monitor and auto-block capability. A bit like Palantir but with active intercept turned on. If you have a low-usage site that suddenly spikes and shows more traffic, your access gets automatically blocked. I think I’m going to have to access the site on a daily basis and keep up with being blocked daily, until the security tool trains itself to recognise the site as more active.

    This is because each time I raise a ticket, I start back at square one with the next UK2 Useful Idiot, writing me the same template email and asking me the same stupid questions, even when my initial contact contains everything they need.

    I’ve asked for contact info for a senior support manager now, but they won’t provide it.

    What to do? Web hosting has become a rush to the bottom of the barrel. All the providers out there appear to be completely useless. If my domestic internet contract didn’t explicitly prohibit home hosting, I would do it all myself.

    Sigh.

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