Since Easyspace was acquired by Iomart for £10.5M at the tail end of 2004 services have been in decline. One of the problems, and I speak as a user and customer of Easyspace since the 90's, has been in their outsourcing of support services to India. When support was based on shore in Byfleet, Surrey, the technical response and customer service experience, was always spot on. 

This Thursday I contacted Easyspace support with a very simple problem to resolve. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to renew five of the domains in my stable with a debit card, as I have been doing, for what must be now almost ten years. 

The response I got back on my support ticket, time stamped 4:33am (about 9am local time India) claimed "Debit Card is for Monthly Customers Only.", and prompts me to follow a link about payment methods which goes on to explain about direct debits. 

My query had asked "I have tried to renew these [domains] on three separate occasions, even using different debit cards but I keep getting the same message - unable to process at this time."....

Iomart is a public company. You expect an appreciation of the difference between a debit card and a direct debit, but there isn't one. Perhaps this is an outcome of not properly managing an outsourced function, where you end up getting a customer response which begins "this is the wrong answer".

Of course, since last year I have been migrating all my services away from Easyspace, ever since I had been encouraged / miss-sold an upgrade to a dedicated server with a rubbish Plaxo control panel. In fact, this is the reason I registered the domain, reallyannoyshit.com and started this blog. Over a year later and this company are still annoying the s... out of me, and are still getting it wrong.

Just in case you might have cycled into this tree, Surrey County Council had the foresight to put chevron markings around it....