Over the past few months I have been trying to wrest control of a .uk domain that I own from a company called “BritishNIC”. As far as I can tell, they have gone out of business, but you’d never know it because their website is still up, you can still login, and you can still (attempt to) make changes. But you can only attempt to, because nothing will actually work – including, crucially, trying to renew your domain, or transfer it somewhere else. If you’re unfortunate enough to have a domain registered there, you’re in trouble.
I had to engage the (expensive, unfriendly, and difficult to use) services of Nominet in order to forcibly rip my domain from the clutches of the corpse of BritishNIC, and this has taken far longer, and cost more money, than it really should. Nominet still list BritishNIC as one of their “approved” registrars, making the whole concept of a Nominet-approved registrar a complete joke.
I wanted to end this post by recommending a better UK registrar than BritishNIC, but as far as I can tell there really aren’t any good ones. I have switched to “Gandi”, because it was recommended by really quite a lot of people, but my initial experiences have been exceedingly poor. Still, they’re a big company that a lot of people seem to like, so I guess you could do worse.
Update August 2011: The situation with BritishNIC hasn’t changed, as you can see from the comments below. That Nominet haven’t shut them down is farcical. However, I can now recommend NameCheap as an alternative registrar. They’re great.
I’ve just noticed I’ve got a domain expiring with them in 2 days, so if I try renewing it wouldn’t work anyway?
I remember trying to transfer away from them 2 years ago just before I renewed then and ended up giving up!
I use 123-reg nowadays, about half the price of BritishNIC!
I’d be very interested to see if you have any success.
Ahh! Sounds like my suspicions are confirmed. I’ve been trying to get a password reminder for my account for the last week and no automated reminder e-mails or confirmations of my service requests have come through to my inbox. There is also not a trace of a phone number on their site. I’m based in Glasgow where their office is/was so I might have to go and try and see what’s going on.
It’s all pretty irritating to have paid to own something and have to try and guess the status of the company you paid to. There should be some mechanism in place for this eventuality, similar to when companies going into receivership.
I wrote this article over a year ago. Shocking to see that Nominet haven’t done anything about it.
I just received an email reminder about my domain expiring on 4th November and it reminded me that I’ve been wanting to transfer from them for a while. I thought to be on the safe side I would Google “Transfer from British NIC” and I found this page.
Are you sure they are out of business? The company info at the bottom of the page points to http://www.ukinternetsites.co.uk/ and the blog and twitter for them seems to be active. I have sent an email and a tweet and message via the website. My main email domain is registered with them and I can’t afford to lose it.
No, I’m not sure of anything because I couldn’t get any kind of response from them whatsoever.
I wrote this page a long time ago, so things may have changed, though judging from recent comments here, I bet not.
Well I got a fairly swift reply from the parent company and British NIC and they were quite surprised by this blog page. They are still in business.