Labs

As a member of the Pipex group, 123-reg is part of the same group of companies as WebFusion. Its Starter Pro package, which costs £4.69 per month plus an initial £9.99 setup charge, is the most expensive web-hosting package available from 123-reg and provides 500MB of storage space for your website and a monthly traffic limit of 5GB, which should be enough for a modest site.

The ordering and registration process is a bit confusing, as you have to set up an account and log in before you can actually subscribe to a package. Subdomains are available, but they cost £10 each per year, which is much more than any other service

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charges, and most offer a quota as part of the package. You can access the included 35 email addresses either through the advanced webmail interface or using a POP3 client, but there is no IMAP support.

Getting your site online is straightforward using either FTP or the basic online file manager. Managing your site is a little harder, however, as 123-reg's proprietary control panel is both confusing and limited. Rather than presenting a range of appropriate web administration tools, the 123-reg control panel simply contains a long list of products and services that you may or may not have already purchased, including a limited website builder. The bottom half of this list gives access to basic email and domains settings, while a button in the middle of it all launches the actual web administration options. From here you can launch the file manager, change your password, view website statistics and buy additional services such as FrontPage extensions and increased bandwidth.

While 123-reg should not be judged solely on its abysmal control panel, there is little else under the bonnet to justify the price. Four other packages in this test cost exactly the same as the Starter Pro package, and all are significantly better.