Rolph Haspers, Operations Director of LeaseWeb remarked, ”Various developments caused our Support Department to become somewhat overburdened at the end of 2008.In Q4 2008, LeaseWeb experienced a tremendous growth spurt that had repercussions on the Support Department. This department was facing extra difficulties due to the unfortunate lack of engineers at that time, and the fact that it had too many lower qualified engineers. Also, we are traditionally a highly technology-oriented company, which is not always conducive to customer-friendliness and which became more apparent during this stressful period.”

The most recent semi-annual customer survey held among more than 1,300 customers showed that the measures are having a positive effect. The upgrade of LeaseWeb’s Support Department included the hiring of 20 more highly qualified engineers and the improvement of the terms of employment. In addition, all support engineers completed a series of communications training courses to improve their ability to operate in a more customer-friendly manner. These measures have resulted in an impressive 20% increase in the number of fully satisfied customers over the past six months.

More than six months ago, immediately after the disappointing support results from the previous customer survey, both short-term and long-term measures were implemented in order to provide the customers with renewed confidence in a positive support experience. Haspers: The survey results confirmed our gut feeling and we immediately took action. Our short-term measures included the temporary hiring of additional Support staff, partly from the UK. These highly experienced employees were able to relieve some of the pressure and provide effective support to less experienced staff.

For the longer term, LeaseWeb immediately started looking for more highly qualified engineers in an effort to expand its Support Department with additional permanent staff. Haspers: This expansion process is still continuing, although the current staffing of the department already has significantly improved the ability to handle peak loads. This positive effect is clearly reflected in the most recent semi-annual customer survey. In addition, six months ago, we immediately decided to relieve the burden on the Support Department in a structural manner through additional investments in automation, among other areas, and by unlinking the provisioning process, i.e. the process of making servers and other hardware available. That should also help to lighten the work load of the department and improve the quality of support.

Many of LeaseWeb’s customers are Internet professionals or specialists such as system integrators, Web developers and application developers who resell LeaseWeb’s hosting services and integrate them into a total solution. As a result of this particular customer focus, customers have a relatively extensive knowledge of hosting. Support nonetheless remains vital. Haspers: Hosting has become a commodity for these companies. They have some knowledge of hosting, but they want to have the ability to fully concentrate on the services they provide in addition to LeaseWeb’s basic hosting products. In that sense, support remains vital for them.

Are there any other needs when it comes to support? Haspers: The customer survey confirms that we are on the right track and that our quality improvement operation has been successful, but we want to optimize our support to an even further extent. Our focus for the coming six months is to further improve the response and resolution times for issues. In addition, we are continuously working on expanding our engineers’ knowledge, e.g. through additional certification processes, in order to take the customers technical support experience to yet a higher level.

LeaseWeb is an international provider of hosting solutions that is primarily geared towards the professional market. The company is among the top-20 hosting providers worldwide and its services include server virtualization, dedicated servers, collocation, streaming, webhosting, and domain name registration. LeaseWeb is the proprietor of a first-class network that offers a bandwidth of more than 750 Gbps, spanning four data centers in the Amsterdam region via major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is also present via Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Londen, Frankfurt, New York, Brussel, Kopenhagen, Parijs, Budapest, Boekarest, Warschau, Praag, Bratislava, Milaan, Wenen, Stockholm, Oslo, Zuumlrich and Madrid. This way, LeaseWeb enables companies around the world to create and continue their online presence in a simple and affordable manner. Since its founding in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb has expanded its network to include more than 22,000 servers. LeaseWeb’s clients include Royal Joh. Ensched OGD, 123Video, Jaap.nl, Relatieplanet, MijnAlbum, Starbucks, Hyves, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Twenga, Direct Wonen, Heineken, Wikipedia, and Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Ruud Mous, Sales Director of LeaseWeb noted, ”Emrah’s work experience prior to his appointment at LeaseWeb will be useful. In addition, he is a Turkish national, which is a great advantage when doing business in Turkey. He speaks the language, he knows the culture, and he is familiar with the customs. I expect that this will have a positive impact on the LeaseWeb sales results in Turkey.”

Emrah Aydin, 29, will be a strong addition to LeaseWeb’s international business development team for its intensive marketing campaign in Turkey. Mr Aydin previously worked as a regional sales manager for Emerson Network Power in Poland.

Mr. Mous added, ”Turkey lags far behind the Netherlands in Internet infrastructure, and the Turkish market has a great need for effective Internet services. All companies based in Turkey are now required to have a domain name and an e-mail address so that they can always be accessed through the Internet. Roadside billboards encourage Internet use through advertisements such as “The Internet is the vitamin for your children.”

The Amsterdam region, which constitutes the basis for LeaseWeb’s global hosting network spanning telecom carriers and Internet exchanges, is attractive to the Turkish market because of the excellent connections that converge here.

Mr. Mous continued, ”Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt are the world’s most important Internet exchanges. The attraction of Amsterdam also makes LeaseWeb attractive to companies located in the Turkish region. In addition, LeaseWeb’s network has a bandwidth of more than 750 Gigabits per second, which is critical to such areas as streaming and rapid scalability in web environments. Very few companies in Europe have this amount of bandwidth available in their networks.”

In preparation for its Turkish marketing campaign, LeaseWeb joined an economic mission to Turkey together with State Secretary of Economic Affairs Frank Heemskerk in late 2008. LeaseWeb also has Turkish-speaking office staff who can handle customer calls in their native language. LeaseWeb has since signed contracts with multiple customers in Turkey, including Kanal7-haber7, Akilli.tv, Turkticaret.net, Super Muzik, Tescilet.net-Kurtlarvadisi.com, timsah.com, uzmantv.com, and Internethaber.com.

LeaseWeb has had good experience with the deployment of business development managers in different countries, who maintain face-to-face contacts with (prospective) customers in those markets.

Mr. Mous concluded, ”Personal contacts are a key factor in our ability to close deals. In Turkey especially, deals tend to be based on trust rather than on specifications. You cannot achieve this with telephone sales.”

LeaseWeb is an international provider of hosting solutions that is primarily geared towards the professional market. The company is among the top-20 hosting providers worldwide and its services include server virtualization, dedicated servers, collocation, streaming, webhosting, and domain name registration. LeaseWeb is the proprietor of a first-class network that offers a bandwidth of more than 750 Gbps, spanning four data centers in the Amsterdam region via major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb is also present via Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Londen, Frankfurt, New York, Brussel, Kopenhagen, Parijs, Budapest, Boekarest, Warschau, Praag, Bratislava, Milaan, Wenen, Stockholm, Oslo, Zumlrich and Madrid. This way, LeaseWeb enables companies around the world to create and continue their online presence in a simple and affordable manner. Since its founding in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb has expanded its network to include more than 22,000 servers. LeaseWeb’s clients include Royal Joh. Ensched, OGD, 123Video, Jaap.nl, Relatieplanet, MijnAlbum, Starbucks, Hyves, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Twenga, Direct Wonen, Heineken, Wikipedia, and Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Cedric Anes, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Twenga remarked, ”In one year, the number of web pages scanned by our crawler doubled from 100 million to 200 million. This rapid growth put very high demands on our server capability. We were able to rely on LeaseWeb’s large hosting capacity to scale up rapidly. LeaseWeb’s ability to add servers at any time was a crucial factor in our rapid growth.”

This strong growth in server capability was driven by the success of Twenga’s 13 web sites, including the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, Russia, the United States and Australia. Twenga is a global price comparison and shopping search engine. The company was founded in 2006.

In March 2008, Twenga received about 11 million visits per month and indexed 30,000 e-retailers. One year later, by March 2009, these numbers had grown to 22 million visits and 60,000 e-retailers. Twenga’s product offering also grew significantly, from 70 million to more than 130 million products.

Twenga’s server expansion was designed primarily to meet the increasing demands of its crawler, the TwengaBot. This proprietary web bot technology scans 200 millions Web pages every day. It uses some 200 out of Twenga’s 300 servers.

LeaseWeb delivers a dedicated, Linux-based hosting solution that uses LeaseWeb’s global hosting network to Twenga. The solution currently encompasses 300 servers, distributed by LeaseWeb over a series of 19 inch racks in CO2 neutral data center EvoSwitch. Twenga’s server infrastructure, as installed at LeaseWeb, includes crawler servers, search servers, web servers and database servers. The hosting solution also incorporates Cisco networking equipment, such as switches, firewalls and load balancers.

The hosting solution was designed by Twenga’s engineers in collaboration with LeaseWeb’s engineers. The latter also provide 24×7 installation, management and knowledge-intensive support services.

Twenga, the new-generation search engine, is designed to allow millions of shoppers throughout the world to find what they want, at the best price, from the online shop of their choice.

Thanks to its proprietary technology, Twenga automatically gathers offers from online retailers and displays them in one searchable interface. As a result, Twenga has the most comprehensive listing of online shops.

Its search results are objective and not biased by commercial relationships. Founded in 2006 by Bastien Duclaux and Cedric Anes, Twenga is headquartered in Paris, France; its 13 sites, including the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, Russia, the United States and Australia, display more than 130 million offers from over 60,000 online shops. In March 2009, Twenga sites received over 22 million visits.

LeaseWeb is an international provider of hosting solutions that focuses on the business market.

The company is listed on the global top 20 of hosting providers and offers services such as virtualization, dedicated servers, colocation, streaming, web hosting and domain name registration. LeaseWeb owns a first rate network with a bandwidth exceeding 500 Gbps and expands via the main telecom carriers across 4 data centers in the Amsterdam area. LeaseWeb also has a presence in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Frankfurt, New York, Vienna, Stockholm, Warsaw, Zurich, Prague and Madrid via Internet exchanges.

As a result, LeaseWeb enables companies worldwide to create and maintain their online presence in an easy and cost efficient manner. Founded in 1997, hosting provider LeaseWeb currently manages over 20,000 servers. LeaseWeb’s clients include Starbucks, Royal Joh. Enschede, Kaspersky Lab, WIGE MEDIA AG, 123Video.nl, zaplive.tv, OGD, Relatieplanet.nl, MyAlbum.com and PricewaterhouseCoopers.