123-reg

123-reg

Founded	2000
Headquarters	Hayes, London, United Kingdom
CEO	Patrick Pulvermuller
Managing director	Richard Winslow
Industry	Domain Registrar Web hosting SSL certificates small businesses
Employees	1,200
Parent	HEG
Website	www.123-reg.co.uk

123-reg is headquartered in England and is a domain registrar and web hosting company.^[1] The company claims to be the UK's largest accredited domain registrar^[2] which provides internet services to small- and medium-sized business. 123-reg is part of HEG, Europe's largest privately owned hosting company.^[3] As of 2016, 123-reg was said to manage over 3.5 million domain names and is said to be connected to over 1m websites in the UK representing 1 in 5 of the UK’s active websites.^[4]

History

123-reg was founded in 2000^[5] by Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford who prior to this also set up Webfusion Internet Solutions Ltd in 1997.^[6] According to the company's parent, 123-reg became the UK's largest domain registrar in 2004 and passed the 3 million domain names under management in 2012.^[7]

Company growth

• In 2000, 123 Reg began trading^[4]
• In 2004, 123 Reg became the largest domain registrar in the U.K^[8]
• In 2009, Webfusion Ltd was formed to make part of Host Europe Group
• In 2009, 123 Reg became the first U.K web host to offer Microsoft Windows 2008 web hosting
• In 2009, 123 Reg/Webfusion opened it's new £2.5m data centre in Leeds, U.K^[9]
• In 2009, 123 Reg became the first U.K domain registrar to pass the 2m domain names under management
• In 2010, 123 Reg/Webfusion was named in Sunday Times Deloitte Buyout Track 100^[10]
• In 2012, 123 Reg became the first U.K domain registrar to pass the 3m domain names under management

VPS Deletion Episode

On 16 April 2016, 123-reg admitted a major deletion of a large number of VPS servers caused by an error during what should have been routine maintenance.^[11] The event deleted hundreds of websites with users losing sites and access to data on their VPS service. By 24 April 2016 the situation was still ongoing. During this period 123-reg had a further data breach with customers being able to see the support tickets of other account holders^[12]

References