Feast of Fools

eHost's oh-so-clever billing system can't handle non-US credit card details. However, eHost's oh-so-clever billing system is not clever enough to a) recognise this or b) do anything about it, so they merrily assured me that I had auto-renew set up on thenoodlebowl.com and then sent nary another communication until Ivan pointed out that my site appeared to have been bought out by the Bowl-Makers Association of America.

In huge panic I promptly zipped over to their godawful website to try to renew it, where I tried to renew about five times with different permutations of my details and each time was told that the card had been rejected due to incorrect address.

So I called up Barclays to ask them what was up with my address that I couldn't pay for stuff, and they said aggrievedly that all five transactions had gone through perfectly well and they'd just stopped my card because they suspected fraud.

@$%$! There then followed two loooooooong international calls to eHost's poor bastards in the Indian call centre, who were all lovely but on the most horribly soul-destroying servile script I've ever heard. 'Thank you *so* much for holding for me!' Made you want to go over there and emancipate them with a baseball bat.

*groan* And in the end they had to go into their billing system manually and do something cunning from the back end which involved taking the money back there and issuing me with a voucher which I could use to renew... or something... I mean HONESTLY.

The moral of the story: don't ever buy domain hosting from eHost. They suck. And the wage inflation in Mumbai may be fast but it ain't fast enough.