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
I realy do admire your attidute towards uk2.net, i have been using them for quite some time and have only recently found how what a poor service they provide. Im using a combination of PHP and mySQL on my site and have discovered that as well as some of the security settings being made had to find, once i finaly did get my site working it wont work on my own PC, and you cant find their setings anywhere! When you changes provider what did you do? I take it you dont get any compensations, iv paid recently for a further 2 years, am I stuck?
If I remember correctly, I had to *fax* them with details. This I still think is wrong in this so called technicological world. Anyway, I narrowed down my options to 2 hosting companies. The first was netweaver, and the second was UKWSD. I plumped for the second one, and the support has been excellent. The servers are based in the US, but I’ve had no major problems with them, and they are always friendly, and willing to help out if they can.
Having just paid UK2, unless you are prepared to loose the money you paid, stay with them until a few months before you are up for renewal. Though in theory UK2 should refund anything due, double check that they will before before you move. I would actually suggest this for anybody considering moving from one hosting company to another. If you can afford to move then go ahead! Be interesting to see if they have improved anything.
Do you still get the newsletters from them?
UK2.net are much worse than this. Every time they make a mistake, they charge a hefty admin fee to fix it. For the second time in a month, they’ve dropped our domain out of the DNS without so much as contacting us. Then, they claim that we made a chargeback on the credit card – which is not true. Worse, they won’t let us leave without paying them what we “owe” them.
Fortunately, there is a solution: to escape from UK2.net, just ask Nominet to transfer the tag. This can be done without the consent of UK2.net, and only costs £15. See: https://secure.nic.uk/cgi-bin/changeagent/Transfers.cgi?new=1
You can then transfer your tag to the registrar of your choice. Personally, I’ve been very happy with just-the-name.co.uk
Richard
I can understand the minimal support UK2 provide, in particular as they also provide maximum means of self administration. However in extremis they are useless. I have a leased server and purchased the online support. Each time I use support – say once a year – I have to threaten to write to the CEO to ultimately get the support I have paid for. Next step is to make an ASA complaint. I’m now in the process of transferring hosting to servershed, domains I expect I will try just-the-name as above
What UK2 don’t seem to realise is that without a decent customer support they are going to lose more and more people.
As mentioned I use: UKWSD with whom I have no complaints 🙂
Have just started dealing with UK2.net as a client has required me to transfer their domain to my UKReg account. Not as easy as I had hoped. From looking at their support pages, and their no email no phone policy, I have been forced to fill out the ticket support request. Will let you know how long this takes! From what was mentioned above, looks like their response is going to be along the lines of – fax us the details. Not looking forward to the upcoming exchanges of trying to transfer the domain off them! Keep you posted, thanks for the help above.
Richard Smith
http://www.inyoureyes.co.uk
Might be interesting to compare with my experiences, please keep me informed.
Good luck with it!
Has now ground to a prompt halt. UK2.net wanted to charge an “admin” fee of £12.50 to transfer the domain. What a joke. The client has decided to stay with UK2.net as the cost of the release fee matches the renewal for 2 years. Gotta ask yourself, is it really worth it. At least both myself and the client have learnt a lesson – stay away from UK2.net!
Nice website by the way, glad you escaped the UK2.net grip on the world!
Richard Smith
http://www.inyoureyes.co.uk
If they have had their domain for more than 2 years then UK2 are still mis-behaving my making people pay to move the domain.
To be honest I;’d suggest moving it sooner rather than later, just to get it away from them!
I have been with UK2 for 3 years and in my experience there technical support appears to be non-existant.
I have been reporting a fault to them for over 1 month now and have received no response. Even sending messages to their “complaints” department results in an auto-email response. UK2.net are providing by far the worst support that I have ever come across.
Can anyone advise, when I switch my domains to someone like UKWSD is there any period of service outage?
When switching hosting companies, try and find one that allows you to upload files before the domain is transferred. that way you minimise any service outage. Yes there may be some, but only whilst waiting for DNS caches to clear.
I’ve just come across UK2.net as one of my customers is having a problem with them. The domain name she bought and paid for is still registered to her but the hosting is having a problem. The souce for the web site she was hosting with them has mysteriously disappeared! UK2.net said they were updating their servers when she asked them what the problem was – funny coincidence? One week later there is still no web site – four days after the supposed server update that was to fix the problem.
We use supanames to host most of our customer sites and although you don’t get to talk with their support guys the emails do get responded to quickly and efficiently. They don’t chrge you anything to move away from them either and at under £14 a year for a basic hosting which includes cgi and a mysql database it’s not a bad deal.
I will let you know how we get on with UK2.net and whether they admit they are at fault and have lost the source code for the web site.
UK2.net – !$&*!~’s Over the years I have had so much fun and games with them trying to get clients domains moved away. There used to be a page on thier site where you could pay the extortiante £19 demanded for admin to allow a transfer away. But I found then that it was released at Joker.com (thier registrar)and you had to go there and fill in a load of forms – and most of it was in German. This month I have two more domains to transfer away from UK2.net and I had a look at teh Joker site and its much better – a whole revamp and its now also in English. However I now find that UK2.net now use Twocows instead…
Does anyone have the UK2.net url of the page where they ask for the fax that Rich mentions? Or any other way of forcing a transfer (The Nominet link that Richard mentioned is good for .co.uk domains only).
I actually got a reply from UK2.net! This is the page to go to to get your domain moved http://amail.co.uk/moveaway.htm
I am utterley pissed off with UK2. Have been emailing them for a week now, and no response.
Website is still not working….. Im at the stage now where I just want the site to work don’t really care about money…….
I would advise no one to sign up with them teck support is Useless… I doubt they will be a company for much longer with such sh**e support for paying customers.
I had loads of problems with UK2 – my domain stopped working, even though I had paid for renewal. I got so frustrated trying to contact them, in the end I went to OpenSRS (Tucows) and had my domain transferred to another host. UK2.net have still not responded to my requests for assistance. I am telling everyone I can about how sh*te they are – and I was a (relatively) happy customer for 4 years! You can read my full story of woe here: http://wp.rossbrown.net/2005/04/14/why-you-should-not-buy-domains-from-uk2net
Yes, same happening here… their network status report suggests ‘Apache – webserver unavailable’ – which is really not good.
I’ve sent them a message every day trying to convince them to contact me as my business relies on http://www.SpecialPlates.com domain – without it I can’t pay the mortgage!!
Anyone have any knowledge of a phone number?!?! I really need to get this sorted, as you guys do, ASAP!!
Joe
Hi
I have been trying to get away from uk2.net and joker.com
I tried: http://amail.co.uk/moveaway.htm
but the form times out! and my new ISP Verio have never heard of joker.com!
and uk2 dont do support or telephone!
If you buy a domain through them you arent actually buying it.. they are buying it and renting it to you.
bastards. its a cheap trick and should not be allowed.
Someone should shut these ******* down!
Rob
I find the whole UK2.net set-up to be a joke. I’ve been with them for a number of years but keep experiencing outages on my email forwarding (the latest being just a couple of days ago). I’m now at the point where I definitely want to move away, but trying to find the page on their website to make this possible takes FOREVER to find. In the future I’ll be buying all my domains through telivo.
Hi there
I am going thru my 2nd year of hell with UK2, and now I am trying to move my domain to GoDaddy.com but boy are UK2 playing hard to get!
Strangely Joker now does seem easier to use to re-assign values away form UK2, but how do you do similar for TUCOWS. How can I get into them to correct the ‘Administrative Contact” etc…
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated
Guy
Well, at last all my domains are back up and running using UK2.net – it appears that they are SO low-budget that they have decided now to make the customer transfer the domain DNS info blah blah themselves!!!!
Apparently this was mentioned in a newletter, but if this isn’t subscribed to you are not to know about the change!! I found out after pulling my hair out for a week with my business site offline.
Many unanswered messages via their ‘help’ system. Wouldn’t it be simple and courteous to just write a quick email to explain the change?!
Happy now things are back up and running… but good grief, what a hassle.
Joe
have recently transfered away from UK2.net after our web site went down for 3 days over a bank holiday weekend, and even their own submission forms failed as we did not get any autoresponse to the messages we sent. Our site did not come back on-line again until about 40 minutes after I hand delivered a very strongly worded letter to their offices in London. They then told us we could not have a refund on remaining services that we had already purchased but soon changed their minds after they were informed that they either paid up within 14 days or we were taking them to small claims court. Even with that they only managed a partial refund, the saga continues. It is not actually as difficult to maove away as you may imagine, however if you submit a form on their site and tell them you want the link to the move away site etc they basically have no choice but to send it. Ironically the problems began the day after a letter arrived telling me what they had done to improve their service:-)))
To contact uk2.net
The office admin tel no is 0207 9870517 (they don’t advertise this so please spread it far and wide. If they change it let me know and I’ll find out the new one)
Fax: 0207 987 0424
Their managing director is Eric Anderson – I’m sure he would be delighted to hear from you all. BTW, they don’t answer the phone “UK2.net, can I help” they just pick it up and say “hello” so don’t be put off. Ask for Paul in technical support. Be specific, apparently there are 3 Pauls on staff:-))
I’ve also had a lack of service problem with my website for a few days now, God knows how many of those email forms I filled in.
I found the email address of an employee and mailed him about the criminal way the support was run…..
I got an email back in 10mins saying they had ‘reset my nameservers’
Don’t they mean reset THEIR nameservers!
I’d try: eanderson@uk2.net
It’s an educated guess at the CEO’s email!
My website is also down and I have had the ‘reset my nameservers’ message too – after threatening legal action for lost earnings. Apparently they seem to respond to that kind of thing, as suddenly i got replies to all my emails. Website not back up, though.
Thanks for the phone number – that is useful to know indeed.
I’ve been using UK2 for about 5 years, and have been really pleased until THIS WEEK – paid for web space on two existing domains, FTP’d the files… and nothing! Completely inactive web sites. I sent in email complaints and got the “resetting nameservers” excuse as well, as well as one with some other info that did not seem to make much sense. Worrying though, on Status, when you log in, it says “Webserver unavailable”! which is not very promising at all! It seems as if something has gone wrong, perhaps just recently, with this company. Problem is I have so many domains with them, .coms and .co.uk switching would be a nightmare. Any advice on bulk switching procedures?
One additional thing: the reason I have liked using UK2 over the years, is that they give you total DNS control. For me, as a web developer with my own setup, this means you can make lots of subdomains and other things and point the web, ftp, mail, subdomains to any IP address you like at the drop of a hat – brilliant for testing, switching from development to live server, testing mailservers etc. Now, if I could find a better hosting company that could also offer this I would be beating a path to their door – does anyone know of another host which offers UK2-type total DNS control via web interface?
All I can say is Michael O’Sullivan, what a legend! We host over 600 domains with UK2 and spend over 10K a year with them and I have been trying to get hold of them through their useless website for months! Just phoned them, they did answer the phone as UK2, and a relatively friendly girl took details of my problems and said someone will get back to me, but I will reserve too much praise until someone does! My problems don’t seem as serious as most on here but I am finding quite of our domains where the email diversion does not work at all and I cannot redirect the streams of junk mail coming in to our company daily. Purchased their Spam Filter Upgrade on one domain for £10 and it did nothing, will attempt a refund on this. Also want to transfer a domain to them and couldn’t get a reply, I’m trying to give them business here!!! I’m spending way too much with these guys to put up with the non-existent service so far, would happily move all of our domains if it was free and easy.
Michael, they are not answering that number this morning, perhaps they have got wise? Are you able to find another for them at all please as my problems remain unresolved? Cheers
Alex,
If I was them I’d be monitoring this page – will look into it and get back ASAP…
Hi Michael,
Thanks for that. I had actually hoped speaking to someone there would get something sorted, clearly not. I cannot believe how bad the service is, I keep finding pages and pages of people on the internet just completely and utterly let down by them.
I’m not sure if they have featured before but I am going to contact the BBC Watchdog programme tonight and try and get them to do a story on them because this is beyond a joke now. I’m this angry and I’m not even spending my own money. If I hosted a private or small business domain with them I would be livid.
I hope they are monitoring this page and I hope they soon get what they deserve.
meanwhile Fax your complaint to them at: 0207 987 0424 and keep a copy. They have indeed stopped answering the phone – however they also refunded all of the money that I had outstanding with them. I had intended to challenge them in small claims on the basis that an unfair contract cannot be enforced under English law, looks like they didn’t want this tested… I am no longer at odds with them as my own problems with them have now been resolved, and good riddence. Need support with the BBC? Put them in touch by all means – I’ll see what my source says about their telephone as soon as I get a chance to speak to them…
I use UK2 to redirect to my blueyonder site. The site’s admittedly not very good and traffic is pitifully low. I’ve been meaning to overhaul it for quite a while but not got round to it. However, I must say I haven’t, until now, had any reason to complain; I’ve been able to use use the self-help to fulfill all my needs. I was very interested to find your blog as a result of my Google search on “uk2.net problem”. My problem is that there’s a mass mailer somewhere that’s started using greentambourine.com email addresses. Of course, I have anything@greentambourine.com redirected to my blueyonder email account. It just started on Saturday night and I have been inundated with “undeliverable mail” responses. I’m not sure in what way UK2 might be expected to help but , after combing my own PC in vain to find out if a mass mailing worm had somehow got past my router , firewall and anti-virus software, I have tried to log in at UK2.NET only to be told the system is down for maintenance. I must say I feel rather suspicious of this as I would not expect an ISP to go offline at any time unless it was in serious trouble.
Do you know anything about this?
Any advice on what I can do about the mass mailer would be a bonus.
UK2 are appalling. One of my domains has been down for two weeks, they keep saying that my nic fee arn’t paid, even though they are. tech support tickets take about 2-3 days to respond. I am so sorry I ever used this company.
They rely on automation far too much and just make assumptions.
Tried the phone number, no reply.
I wonder if it’s a co-incidence that Regus are tenants at the same address as UK2? Regus are a very reputable company who among other services provide ‘virtual offices’. This link is interesting:
http://offices.regus.com/locations/GB/London/LondonCanaryWharf.htm
I can recommend Regus if anyone needs these kinds of services; they are very good and highly professional. Is it possible that UK2 are/were using these services? That would certainly clarify things wouldn’t it? Personally I wouldn’t care less if someone was running their business from a cow shed if they delivered what they promised…
Dear fellow sufferers.
I wish that I had encountered this page which you have so usefully been building up over the past 6 months or so. I have been leasing a Dedicated Server from Netcetera (inetc.net) for the past 3 or 4 years, with no complaints at all, other than finding them quite expensive, certainly compared to UK2.
So I was tempted to go for the UK2 dedicated Server, and plunged in feet first, opting for the 3 year lease (how foolish was that?).
OK, so everything started off well, within 12 hours I had been notified by email that the wheels were in motion, then by a further email telling me that the the process was finished, and I would be hearing from them again within the next 24 hours letting me use my server. That was the last I heard from them, and that was almost 2 weeks ago.
Being unable to contact them in any other way, I diligently filled in a support ticket asking for a status update, then I waited. having heard nothing after 48 hours, I filled in another ticket, and waited … and another … and another … and …….. well, you get the idea. Not a peep.
I notice that they charged my credit card promptly enough. It was charged on the day of my order.
My sympathies go to all of you, and judging from the messages above, my predicament is not unusual, and it looks like I haven’t waited nearly long enough compared to your experiences.
Today, I have issued them with an ultimatum, but I can see the wry smiles growing on your faces as I tell you this. I expect this to be given the same treatment as my tickets. However I was interested to see the phone number listed above, and I shall give that a try (I’ll let you know how I get on).
My experience so far, needless to say, if that I think the service is beyond a joke. I honestly don’t know how they hold on to any customers.
Good luck to all.
Allrite guys, this isnt anything to do w hosting sites, but is their “free” dialup as “free” as they say it is?, email me @ mikespike502002@hotmail.com if u know for definate that it costs…tnx
Last time I used that it was an 0845 number, so you would have to pay for the calls.
Andrew,
you may considering writing to your credit card company and demanding a refund on the basis that the service you purchased was not provided – they are equally responsible
We signed up to the 3 year deal too…4 and a half years later we have just got too frustrated with the daily interruptions to service, a server that goes down at the slightest mention of ‘wow we’ve been up for 6 hours’!!! and the complete lack of support.
We are glad to be walking away from a supplier that, in our humble opinion, should be disallowed from trading.
We realise that they are a low cost solution however that is no excuse for not answering the telephone, not replying to snail mail, not replying to online support request submissions and not replying to emails to the address they say to email to!!!
Admittedly we were happy with them (because we had few problems and those that we did we sorted them ourselves) until about 6 months ago but they have gone downhill, fast, from there.
The one slightly good thing is that they have honoured every refund request we have made to them against their service level agreement. They will be getting another refund request today – we have been inaccessible since earlier this morning with, yet again, no responses.
Oh, and by the way…I took this from their site, thought it was fantastic…
“We do not offer telephone support. Many online companies like UK2.NET, Ebay, Yahoo, Altavista cannot be contacted by telephone, email, fax. This is part of the new economy and is necessary to cut down costs, so users can get very affordable services.”
The important part for me was “cannot be contacted by telephone, email, fax”…they’d be as well changing this to “cannot be contacted by any means”
Sorry for the rant…..although you could act like UK2 and pay no attention! 🙂
Yahoo in the UK at least show there details on the site:
Contact Yahoo
Ebay do show their address, and have a contact from on the site, but I couldn’t find telephone, email or fax details.
Altavista.com also show there details:
About Altavista
Looks like UK2 didn’t do their research properly!
Hi, I wonder if anyone else is having mail forwarding problems with uk2net. Having read the above, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I can’t get any response from them about – but I seem to lose about 20% of the mail forwarded by them!
Many thanks for any pointers
Peter
I am having a hell of a time trying to get the services I have paid for from UK2. Over 2 months ago my debit card was charged with the required amount to register and host a ltd.uk domain name and purchase web space, however this name has not been registered as yet. I have had some corespondance with UK2 via thier web form but it seems the person I am in touch with beleieves that I have registerded the domian elsewhere and that I need to provide the details needed to allow it to be moved. My invoice from UK2clearly shows the charge for registratiom with nominet so how can this be a problem?… oh well back to the contact form.
We were experiencing email problems also (and everything else above) – They just weren’t forwarding email on – and problems persist with the DNS management. We are now moving to positive-internet.com.
Not one support message has been answered. NOT ONE!
If anyone knows the new contact numbers (both fax and telephone), can you please post them!
Someone should shut these guys down!
Hi
Just fell across your site whilst browsing. This is just an observation, I think I am right in saying that if you as a person or a company suffer financial loss through anothers poor service and you cannot get through to them to forward a charge or seek some other route to solve the issues due to thier disregard for your efforts to contact them, You can approach Comapnies house and set in motion an application to have thier company wound up, I would imagine the reaction would be swift. I believe this costs few pounds.
Hello All,
This is a follow-up to my posting of June 10th above. My continued pursuite of UK2 failed on all fronts; following more than a dozen postings (unresponded), and numerous emails (unreplied), and various phonecalls (unanswered), I resorted to trading standards, and my credit card company, passing all history and information on to them for them to pursue.
I’ll give you one guess as to how successful both of them were in reaching UK2 ……… yes, that’s right, ZIP!
Now at least to my satistfaction the matter is closed. My credit card company has re-credited my account, and I can try to put the whole sordid affair behind me.
I’d just like to convey my best wishes to all who are still experiencing the pain, and I hope that your problems are soon rectified.
Good luck to all
🙂
I understand the company known as uk2.net has changed names twice – UK2Net Ltd to UK2 Ltd to, now UK-2 Ltd.
It is wholly owned by one man, Erik Andersen, who pays very large dividends to himself each year. UK-2 Ltd is wholly owned by a company in Gibraltar called UK2 GroupLtd. And its bankers are based in Luxembourg.
Every single one of these is a big warning sign.
I had a look at the last set of UK2 accounts with companies house. It ain’t peanuts as the man said. A follow up visit to their registered address produced blank looks from the staff on reception. All of our own hosting etc now managed by http://ellicottcitygraphicarts.com – they are everything that UK2 are not, the package they offer is very impressive… have had enough of the big companies, it seems that once they have your money they quickly lose interest.
Michael
Everything bad about this company is covered above, but i’ve got to vent my anger somewhere.
Been trying to get some domains off them for ages – thay are a waste of time and a joke company. I work so hard at my design company to give customers an excellent level of service, so when I see a company such as UK2, they really pi** me off – what’s worse is Eric is probably driving round in an expensive motor and lives in a big house!
I’m going to complaint to trading standards about this company and may even ring up that program – think it’s watchdog!!
Guess what?!!?!?
I got a response from a support request from them…shame it is actually over 4 months old!!!
In the end all they are telling me is that they will have to reinstall my server box. It will only be around 1 hours downtime…fair enough I think…until they tell me that I will have set up every single little thing again…myself…no assistance to get all my virtual site settings back, etc….and there are a _lot_ of them.
They have pointed me in the direction of a specialist company that does this kind of thing though….for some reason I suspect that it is UK2 in disguise…just to get even more money out of me.
I would normally be concerned and mighty peeved off but I’m actually smiling…they don’t know that I have made alternative provisions and have already moved every one of my clients away from them.
Wonder if they will be contacting me to come back to them when they try to bill me and find the credit card details changed…..ha!
Anyway…I agree with the comments above…..they really should be shut down and steps taken to keep them down.