I've also had a domain name fall down a black hole. Not with PN bu with 1&! who are one of the big registrars.

I wanted to relinquish a domain so I informed 1&1 and haven't been invoiced for it or paid for it for over 2 years. But it's still shown as registered so it's unavailable to others. It's on my 1&1 control panel but I can't do anything with it, notably switch off the redirect associated with it.

I've complained to 1&1 a couple of times but to no avail. i've decided to just live with it and hope that one day they might notice.

To the OP: Good luck in getting your domain sorted, but as others have said it would be a lot cheaper to get it transferred to another registrar. I did this many years ago (PN to1&1) without any problems.

If you can't get this sorted with plusnet. nominet (the registry for all .uk domains) have tools that will allow you to do this via there online services.
They also have a help desk that you can call (that will be answered by a real person within seconds) that will help and advise you what you need to do.

Take a look at the nominet website, particularly http://www.nominet.uk/domains/manage-your-domain/onl...

If you own any *.uk domains, you should setup a nominet account for security in case of ISP issues.

Thanks all for the advice - seems like I'm not the only one that has had issues.

I'm still without access to the domain, and it seems Plus.net can't / won't do anything as the domain is no longer tagged to them (of their doing!). I have spoken with Nominet this morning and have gone through their 'regain control' process and am just waiting for their response.

I found some registration letters from Nominet last night from 2003 - 2005 which will hopefully be useful proof it does belong to me!

Once I've regained control I'll hopefully get it re-tagged and get some email.

You don't just need the domain, you need email hosting as well. Also web hosting if you have a site.

A domain is just the title. It isn't a service. I assume Plusnet were providing email and web hosting with the domain. If they were, was that "free"? That would account for the apparently very high price. The domain need not even be registered through the same provider as the web/mail hosting, but at our level it's sensible to have them the same.

I pay my domain registrar (Tsohost as posted before) £6.70 every two years for domain hosting, and £14.99 per year for combined web space and email hosting.

Web hosting always includes mail hosting, but some companies will supply just mail hosting. In both cases the domain remains (technically) a separate item. As explained above.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 04-Dec-15 11:24:12)

Thanks - Understand that.

I'm taking this one step at a time! Plus.net will be hosting the domain (eventually...)

Hmmm.

Tsohost answer both phone and email within minutes. 24/7.

and when I phoned them - twice over a Wordpress problem - the line quality was so bad I could hardly understand them

In reply to a post by gb7:

Plus.net will be hosting the domain (eventually...)

Why? Makes no sense to me.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Ye Gods!

Click the Tsohost link in my sig!

DotUK domains cost well under £7 per two years from all dedicated hosting companies, with email hosting on the domain starting at £15pa or lower.

Transfer the stuff into there.

Second the recommendation for Toshost, I've been using a reseller account on their cloud to host a few friends (rather than let my previous cpanel server fall into neglect due to time constraints and risk it getting hacked due to lack of maintenance).

Definitely not the cheapest provider, not by a long shot but they actually do seem to care about providing a decent service. They've always been pretty quick to respond when I've needed them to do something or had a question.

Seen a few short outages, usually either when a San goes wonky or they get DDOS'd but they're usually resolved quickly and they tend to be pretty good at providing RFO's and letting you know what they're planning to do to try and prevent a re-occurrence.

Which is exactly doing it right in my book, you can't plan for every single possibility it's about how they react when something does go wrong that makes one of the key differences between a good provider and a bad one in my opinion.

Right... Time for an update!

Started the 'Regain Control' process with Nominet on Friday morning, and rang them at about 5.20 on Friday to see if they had had a chance to review.

What a helpful place they are - phone answered almost instantly, and spoke to an incredibly helpful chap, who asked me to send in a scanned letter with a scan of proof of ID (Driving Licence). Once I'd done this, rang back (by now it was probably about 5.45 and they close at 6pm) and spoke to him again. He read the letter and authorised the 'regain', so I was able to log into my domain and point it to FORCE9 (PlusNet's tag) for a tenner. He stayed on the line throughout the process - I was seriously impressed with their approach to customer service. If anyone from Nominet is reading this, tell Andrew Hyland he's doing a great job

I then needed PlusNet to update my domain with their nameservers, but they don't do this over the weekend - Monday / Tuesday was the best they could promise...

Reading the posts on here, I decided to move my domain away from them and point it to TSOHost. Cost me another tenner with Nominet online to re-tag, but I'm now all set up with TSOHost.

Having been with email for almost a week, there is no better sound than the little 'ping' noise Outlook uses to notify new mails!

Thanks for all the replies and advice!