123-Reg
The UK household name is GoDaddy's UK brand on GoDaddy's platform: the 1p .com needs a three-year purchase and renews at £18.99 ex VAT, .co.uk £3.99 then £12.99, free privacy via Domains By Proxy, DNSSEC and UK office-hours phone support, but no API and a Trustpilot profile that has stopped inviting reviews.
How we test123-Reg (123-Reg Limited, Nottingham; founded 2000; owned by Host Europe Group through Pipex, Oakley, Montagu and Cinven, then bought by GoDaddy with HEG on 3 April 2017 for €1.69 billion) is the registrar many UK businesses have had since their first .co.uk. Today its help centre is a white-label of GoDaddy's (the same article numbers, the same Domains By Proxy privacy, the same Domain Protection tiers, the same transfer procedure), so the product is GoDaddy's; what differs is the price list and the support desk. The good parts: WHOIS privacy is free and automatic on eligible TLDs, DNSSEC is included (five free credits on 123-Reg nameservers, DS records for external DNS), 2FA by authenticator app, .uk-family transfers in are free and transfer-out is fee-free via IPS tag or auth code, and there is a UK phone line, 0345 450 2310, Monday to Friday 8am to 7:30pm, with chat at weekends.
Pricing is ex VAT throughout. The headline .com is 1p, but the small print says "3-year purchase required, limit 1 per person": you pay £0.01 plus two years at £18.99, £37.99 up front, and renew at £18.99, a figure the offer T&Cs page shows climbing from £16.99 to £17.99 to £18.99 across successive offers. The domain-search app quotes a real one-year price of £7.99, which is the first-year figure we record. .co.uk is £3.99 in year one for new customers and £12.99 to renew, a 226% step (the T&Cs still say £11.99, a live inconsistency). Renewals are "charged at 123 Reg's prevailing rate at the time" with no notice period, the T&Cs reserve a "manual transfer fee" of unstated amount, and the redemption fee is "displayed at checkout". There is no public API (the old reseller API is gone and the help centre returns nothing for the word) and no MCP server; automation means a GoDaddy account instead. Trustpilot is 3.9 on 21,857 reviews, but the profile "hasn't invited customers recently", so the 2026 reviews skew to complainants: email and Microsoft 365 migration failures, lockouts with no phone answer, and being asked for paid add-ons before troubleshooting. 123-Reg runs an affiliate programme on CJ Affiliate; Saaskly has applied and any link will be disclosed on this page if approved.
Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, documentation and third-party reviews.
Pros
- +Free WHOIS privacy and DNSSEC included
- +UK phone support in office hours
- +Free .uk-family transfers in and fee-free transfer-out
Cons
- −The 1p .com is a three-year purchase and renews at £18.99 ex VAT, at the "prevailing rate" with no notice period
- −.co.uk renewal is 226% above year one
- −No API or MCP server; Trustpilot 3.9 and no longer inviting reviews
Pricing
Minimum commitment: £18.99 (£18.99/yr for the entry licence). The least you can spend before walking away; excludes numbers, minutes and add-ons.
.com renewal
£18.99/yr · annual commitment
Month-to-month: not published
- ✓GBP ex VAT (£22.79 inc); one-year .com £7.99 in the search app, or 1p with a 3-year purchase; .co.uk £3.99 new customers then £12.99; .io £47.99 then £74.99.
Specifications
| Rating | 2.7 |
| .com renewal / yr | £18.99 |
| .com first year | £7.99 |
| Renewal premium* | 138% |
| .co.uk renewal / yr | £12.99 |
| WHOIS privacy | Free |
| Pricing pattern | Intro discount |
| Checkout upsells | Light |
| Transfer out | Free, self-serve |
| Bring your own DNS | ✓ |
| DNSSEC | ✓ |
| 2FA | ✓ |
| API | No |
| MCP server | No |
| UK phone support | ✓ |
| Blocks AI agents by default** | No |
| Trustpilot (reviews)† | 3.9 (21,857) |
| .co.uk first year | £3.99 |
| Transfer-out fee | Free |
| TLDs offered | 400 |
| Free DNS hosting | ✓ |
| Transfer lock by default | ✓ |
| Free email forwarding | No |
| Free SSL with domain | No |
| 24/7 live chat | No |
| Support channels | Phone 0345 450 2310 (Mon–Fri 8am–7:30pm), Live chat (Mon–Fri 8am–7:30pm, Sat–Sun 9am–5pm), Tickets |
*Renewal premium: how much more the second year of a .com costs than the first, as a percentage of the first-year price. Registrars advertise the first year; you pay the renewal every year after. 0% means the advertised price is the real price. Prices are per domain per year as shown to a UK visitor on the research date, in the currency the registrar bills UK customers in; see each profile for the VAT basis.
**Blocks AI agents by default: whether the registrar's bundled DNS/CDN stops AI agents (chat fetchers, browser-use agents) reaching customer sites unless the owner changes a setting. Recorded only where the vendor documents such a default (Cloudflare, from 15 September 2026, on pages that carry ads).
†Trustpilot: uk.trustpilot.com TrustScore and review count on the research date. Two profiles are not representative of the registrar and are shown for completeness: Cloudflare (1.4) is mostly non-customers blocked by CAPTCHAs on other companies' websites, and Hover (1.3) is 120 unprompted reviews the company has not answered.
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
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