Easyspace has announced the winner of its recent £3000 Custom Web Design "Worst Website" competition.

With over 500 entries received, Easyspace had a tough task narrowing down to four finalists who would be put to public vote for 2 weeks. However, having gone through all entries, often with great amusement at the creative reasoning sent in, four winners were picked. From this final four, www.advertising-calendars.com was voted, by the Easyspace.com users, the website most in need of the prize.

Congratulations to Mr Godding, owner of the winning website. Easyspace is now in contact with Mr Godding to take forward the re-design of the website.

"We contacted Mr Godding late on Monday afternoon to let him know of his win" said Errol Vanderhorst, Sales and Marketing Director for Easyspace.com. "He seemed thrilled at the news and we are delighted to now be able to help him, and hopefully his business, by delivering an extensive website re-design worth up to £3000"

The winner, Mr Godding, added "I am absolutely delighted that my website has been voted the winner of Britain's 'Ugliest Website', and wish to thank everyone who has voted for me!"

The two stage competition ran from 10th December with users firstly invited to send in their websites and their explanations as to why they felt they had the Worst Website. From this first stage, Easyspace selected 4 finalists based on site design and reasoning sent in. Those 4 finalists were then put on a poll on easyspace.com where users were invited to place their votes.

Some of the most popular entries amongst Easyspace staff included:
 
"My husband designed it and it looks like he did (he is a policeman)!! My website is a crime scene....... "

"In a word... 'tacky'. My website is tacky; it looks like it was designed by an amateur, and it was. I did it 6 years ago."

"Because it is bland, stale, uninteresting ,slow, saynothing, donothing, useless."

"I deserve the web site redesign because my site at the moment is rubbish and I haven't got a clue how to change it."

Easyspace has been named as a finalist in the Best Shared Hosting Services category at this year’s ISPA Awards.

The ISPAs - the UK Internet industry awards - are unique as they are awarded to people and organisations in the industry by their peers and reflect the broad nature of the internet services sector.

Companies that have been nominated in a hosting category have been judged on a range of criteria including: performance, value for money, customer support, data centre security, quality standards and product portfolio.

All entrants in the ISPA hosting categories were subjected to physical service testing by Epitiro, an independent organisation that provides a range of benchmarking performance services across dial up, cable, broadband and wireless connections. Over a period of 3 months, Epitiro configured a satellite to periodically download a file from Easyspace’s servers in order to measure availability and non-cached download speed.

Sarah Haran, Managing Director, Easyspace commented: “I am delighted that we have been nominated as a finalist in such a competitive category at this year’s ISPAs. The fact that our shared hosting service has been shortlisted, after independent evaluation, is particularly rewarding as I feel that it validates everything we say about our product and recognises the efforts of the Easyspace customer service and technical teams.”

The Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA UK) has been organising the UK Internet Industry Awards since 1999 to herald the best of the Internet industry and to celebrate innovation and best practice. In 2002 the awards were dubbed The ISPAs.

Other finalists in the Shared Hosting Category are: 123-reg, Exa, Namesco & UK-2.

The winners will be announced at a Gala Ceremony, described by the Daily Mirror as the “Internet Event of the Year”, on Friday 14th March 2008 at the Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square, London

Details of the awards can be found here: http://www.ispaawards.org.uk/

Easyspace has unveiled a new range of dedicated servers.

Easyspace’s new range of Dell servers, featuring Intel Dual and Quad Core Xeon® processors, are designed for excellent performance, faster response times and improved scalability. The new server range has been created to suit all customers from the beginner through to the professional, with prices starting at £69.99 Per Month.

Each server, offered with a choice of Windows or Linux, delivers a host of industry leading features such as genuine unlimited bandwidth, 5GB data storage/back up, Plesk control panel, Tier 1 Network/Multiple Gigabit and hardware fix/replace as standard. A range of additional services and features can be added by the customer to suit their exact requirements.

Errol Vanderhorst, Sales and Marketing Manager, Easyspace, stated: “We find that there exists a certain amount of ‘smoke and mirror marketing’ in the web hosting market place with some hosting companies offering servers that are no more highly specified than a standard workstation or desktop.”

"The addition of our new range of high performance Dell/ Xeon powered dedicated servers reinforces our desire to bring to our customers the latest technologies at affordable prices. Recognising that technology changes rapidly, we do not tie our customers into long term contracts, offering our servers on a month by month rental basis, to ensure that they are not left working with outdated components when the rest of the world has moved on.”

Easyspace’s dedicated server range is backed by 24 x 7 technical support team, a 100% network uptime commitment and will be hosted in iomart’s (our sister company) directly owned and managed data centre network guaranteeing accountability and service levels.

Errol added:” At Easyspace we continue to demonstrate product leadership, and in launching this new range of dedicated servers we also continue to demonstrate that we understand what our customers want. They want value for money quality products, coupled with excellent service, but without the hidden extras and punitive small print.”

The January sale has started at Easyspace.com with Virtual Servers dropping in price to just £9.95 per month, the equivalent of saving 33% over the course of the year!

Virtual Servers from Easyspace come with a minimum of 256MB RAM, 10GB Hard Disk and unlimited Bandwidth and have £100 of Pay-per-Click advertising credits bundled in. These high quality branded servers, with no hidden costs, offer 99.9% uptime and are housed in Easyspace owned Data Centres.

Standard Virtual Servers, for the month of January only, can be bought for one year at £9.95 per month (compared with the normal £13.95 per month) while premium servers have been cut to just £19.95 per month (compared with the normal £29.95 per month).

"We recently upgraded the specification of our Virtual Servers which resulted in an increased demand for the product" said Errol Vanderhorst, Sales and Marketing Director for Easyspace.com, "Our reduced sales prices through January opens this improved, and now incredibly competitive, product up to a wider audience."

The offer lasts until February 1st and includes both standard and premium virtual server packages.