Layer Online focuses on providing quality hosting for all their customers. They only offer cloud hosting solutions, which many people believe is going to be the most common type in the future. They are based in Canada, and have been around since 2008. The company also seems to be mostly focused on business sites, though they would certainly support a personal page as well.
Their site is well made and easy to navigate, and they seem to have a lot of options. In addition to their hosting services they also offer domain registration, SSL Certificates, Web Security and some other related services.
Uptime & Reliability
100% Uptime Guarantee
This company offers a 100% uptime guarantee on their hosting, which is impressive. Give the fact that your hosting will be spread over multiple servers in multiple data centers, and that they use high end hardware, they will likely give you a great hosting experience that is very reliable. While it is almost impossible to ensure 100% uptime, this company seems to get extremely close to that. I haven’t seen any customers complaining of downtime or other issues.
Features
Lots of Nice Hosting Options
This company does an excellent job at laying out the features in their plans in an easy to understand way. This is very helpful for the customers and makes it easy to identify which options you want. In addition to all the typical hosting features that you will find with most companies, you will get good features like solid state drives, a private hosting environment, SEO optimized hosting and more.
They also have real time DDOS protection, which is becoming essential for hosting thanks to the rise in malicious traffic and similar issues. They also have free backups and servers located in many data centers around the world for added reliability.
They have quite a few different hosting plan options, and they seem to be priced well. They are all unlimited in disk space, bandwidth and other related features, which is quite nice. They do offer managed VPS and Dedicated servers, but those don’t get quite the priority on their site.
Support
Support Appears to be Good
This is one area where I think the company could do a better job at providing information about how their service works. They don’t make it clear exactly how you will interact with their support team or anything like that. I haven’t found any complaints from actual customers, however, so it seems like they do a good job once you sign up for their services.
Pricing
Great Pricing for Most Options
The cloud hosting options are priced quite competitively ranging from just $6.95 per month and going up to $19.95. For the price you get a lot of really nice features and a very reliable hosting experience. When you move to their dedicated server options, the prices go up significantly, but that is to be expected. Compared to other dedicated hosting companies, the prices still aren’t out of line at all but I wouldn’t say they are exactly cheap.
Summary
Excellent Overall Hosting
You will really get a great overall user experience when you go with this company. They seem to be well-established, and offer excellent services. I haven’t found any significant complaints from current or former customers and the list of services they provide is quite generous.
Pros:
- SSD Storage
- Free Backups
- Fair Pricing
- 100% Uptime Guarantee
Cons:
- No shared hosting options