Product Reviews

Easyspace's big claim to fame is ease of use. This isn't immediately obvious when you start using its control panel software, which, for most of its services, is custom written. It takes some getting used to, but does have the benefit that it just shows you the options you need to worry about for that task. Its dedicated server options come with the excellent third-party Plesk control panel, as used by several other ISPs.

Easyspace offers many products, including blogging and services (such as EasyWebSubmit, an SEO tool, and EasyMailer for email marketing) to help promote your websites.

Support is also high on the agenda. The website now offers a customer support forum, which is always a brave thing for any ISP to provide. During our test, Easyspace's support response was very good, with tickets being resolved within the hour.

Prices are particularly keen, with dedicated

ADVERTISEMENT

hosting being less than half that of the others listed here (it also offers hosting for registered charities for £12.50 per year). As usual, the "unlimited bandwidth" on its server packages is determined by a fair-use policy tucked away in the terms and conditions. Less usually, Easyspace puts some figures to what it classifies as fair use. For example, starter packages should use no more than 50-100GB of bandwidth per month, while the Pro packages allow 150-300GB. Easyspace equates this to approximately 18 million hits a month, but sites that concentrate on graphics and video will obviously consume bandwidth faster. Should your site exceed the limit, Easyspace will charge you £1 per gigabyte per month.

Although Easyspace offers a wide range of products, we'd have liked to see more options when selecting virtual or dedicated servers. For example, the RAM is a little low at 128MB and 256MB on the virtual servers and the virtualisation system is Virtuozzo - so it isn't as flexible as Memset's offering. Also note that the dedicated servers offer only two hard disks, so RAID5 or RAID10 (the recommended configuration for MSSQL) would be impossible to achieve. And, in our tests, it was the slowest in terms of request times, although its downtime was excellent - zero minutes.

Easyspace is easy to use and we found its connectivity and customer service levels to be strong. If the limitations we've highlighted won't be a problem for you, it's a sound choice.