I recently acquired control of a number of domains managed with Easyspace. While the user interface isn’t as clean as my current service of choice (Retrosnub), it seemed good enough.

It wasn’t very long before I ran into an unfortunate issue. Every time I tried to add or delete a DNS entry, I’d be presented with a shiny happy “Success!” message and sent back to the domain list. I’d then see no evidence of my change.

So sometimes, it emerges, that this is just because they lie: “Success” doesn’t mean “Success”, it means “I’m sorry, but we won’t let you point a CNAME to a CNAME” (not a wholly unreasonable position to take, but not required, and seemingly viewed as outdated). Sometimes, it just means they sort-of-lie: “Success” means “Success, but our UI won’t update until you’ve logged out and back in again”, so the UI will display stale data - less of a lie, about as irritating, especially as it’s indistinguishable from lying-Success.

Unsurprisingly, I got quite frustrated by this, and tweeted my feelings. I swiftly received a reply from the Easyspace Twitter account promising investigation and asking me to “reply to the DM with account credentials”. This set off some alarm bells in my head, but I assumed they just meant username. Some faff then ensued, as it seemed they weren’t quite clear on the workings of Twitter with respect to Direct Messages (specifically you can’t send one to someone not following you, and neither of us were following the other), until, to my consternation, I finally received their DM:

No, I am not emailing my password to socialmedia@yourdomain. I don’t really care if you are a legitimate representative of Easyspace, I’m not sending you my password, and for you to ask me to is pretty awful.

I tweeted my shock at this, and the ensuing micro-conversation was even more baffling:

Apparently they need my password “for DPA reasons”. Insane. By all means, “please go away and file a support request”, but asking for my password? I feel Tony sums it up perfectly.

Well, in December 2011, Amazon released a GUI for route53, their highly-available and scalable DNS service. Looks like an excellent candidate to migrate to - after the above, I have no intention of continuing dealing with Easyspace any further.