I'm not sure whether it's just me, but the current flux of companies taking over smaller hosting firms are having a drastic effect on the levels of customer service and support.

Take 123-reg.co.uk It's a cheap domain registrar and has been serving me very well over the past few years. I've rarely had problems with them and they've been very good value for money. Over the past few weeks we've had World Cup fever here in the UK, and companies have been trying to cash in on it. 123-reg has been no exception and had started a promotion whereby if you've got a "world cup baby" born between the 9th June and the 9th July, you qualify for a few domain name plus site building tools. I was somewhat infurated by this. I'm a prospective adopter (International adoption) and feel that by rewarding couples who give birth to their sons or daughters, who know their baby's exact birth date, is highly discrimatory. Adoptive parents are very unlikely to ever know the exact date their child was born. Now I appreciate that 123-reg have got to narrow it down somewhat to births between a particular date (and hence a "world cup baby") but ultimately
it is still a bit too discriminatory for my liking.

I've wrote to Pipex's (the owners of 123-reg) marketing department about this and never heard back. Consequently I decided to take all of my domains over to a new registrar and having 18 UK pounds worth of credit with 123-reg due to them not being able to register an .eu domain (and also thinking I would be sticking with them for a long, long time to come) requested that the £18 be refunded to the debit card on file. It took about three days for somebody to come back to me to tell me to make sure my card was updated in the control panel. I did this, and emailed them back to confirm. Another four days later I receive another email telling me that I was misinformed and it was not possible to transfer credit back onto the debit card. And that was that. I've since fired off another email and expect a response within the next fortnight.

It's not just 123-reg that's got my goat. It's Webfusion - also owned by Pipex. A while back whilst finding a new host for literary fan site I'm currently running, I wanted to find a new host and their VPS offerings looked tempting. I signed up for a free trial and had all manner of problems with it, including it not being set-up properly. Having given up on the support front after several tries, I request cancellation. If you though Sarbanes Oxley was a pain in the rear end, it's nothing compared to Webfusion's cancellation system. You have to send back a signed form (fax or post) before they will action it. God help you if the form is lost if you don't have a fax (which I don't) and it took forever and a day to get any kind of confirmation from them that they had received back the signed form.

Thus I have no love for Pipex any more. Webfusion and 123-reg used to be such good companies once upon a time, and their eventual take over by Hosteurope (and then Pipex) have diminished the quality of service provided.

I fear for the recent EV1 and The Planet takeovers - both by a single company and they now share the same product lines. Fasthosts and 1&1 are now owned by the same company, but the thing is that even before the takeover customer service from both companies have been appalling (I know, I've used both).

So please future venture capitalists - please ensure that when you start bulk buying companies that you at least make sure that you look after the one thing that's going to make your business successful - your customers!

M.