Agency Hosting Solutions

Provide an Integrated Service

Offer a complete service to your clients by including a high quality hosting solution to complement your existing portfolio.

Clients often find themselves bounced between their chosen hosting provider, and the digitial agency commissioned for their latest project. In this situation it's ultimately irrelevant who caused the problem; the net result is that your client's satisfaction is diminished which may inhibit further projects being commissioned with your agency. Blame is not productive for anyone!

When you provide your clients with a fully integrated service this single single point of contact for the entire solution eliminates these problems. It also provides a more attractive service proposition than your competitors - helping you to win more business, and retain it!

Consider:

Varies by project - review it all!

Our Cloud VPS range is a good starter for many smaller scale projects.

Cloud VPS Show me everything!

Benefits of Agency Hosting with Layershift

Be More Productive

Your expertise is brand management, digital marketing, SEO, creative strategy, and application development. These are the very core of your business. It's what you do; what you're good at. Our fully managed Cloud VPS, dedicated servers, and multi-server hosting solutions enable you to retain focus on your core specialities, and avoid time consuming distractions such as trying to coerce a server to your way of thinking.

Take full advantage of Layershift's expertise in hosting excellence to keep your clients' servers running smoothly around the clock - so you don't have to! We handle everything from server troubleshooting, security patching, and reconfiguration to service monitoring and pro-active fault resolution on your behalf so you don't waste any of your valuable time or resources!

Easier to Work With

Creating and deploying new websites and web applications is never easy. There are a million things to think about, and a similar number of things that can go wrong!

After writing perfect code, proudly presenting the finished work to your client, and receiving their sign-off to go live, the last thing you want is a struggle with the client's hosting provider to get it deployed.

Layershift make it easy and painless:

Effortlessly clone whole sites and databases to move through the deployment lifecycle; clone a live site to work on a development copy, move a development copy to staging for client approval, and move a staging site to production.
Something strange happened between dev/stage/live? You're not left to troubleshoot this bizarre bug on your own! Layershift's experienced technical team have seen it all before, and are on hand to help isolate the cause and apply any necessary configuration changes or upgrades for you, or simply provide that vital "extra pair of eyes" to spot the obvious but yet well hidden - saving hours of frustration.
Take advantage of source control software such as Subversion or Git to help you develop and deploy updates and code revisions with a robust audit trail.

Always Have a Backup

Most hosting providers only offer a backup facility as an "optional extra", their backup system only takes a daily backup (and causes poor server performance whilst it runs!), and you'll be waiting hours and hours for the restoration to complete. It's inflexible and you have to overwrite the entire server with a backup image, just to be able to restore a single file or database table that you need.

Layershift include a fully managed backup service as a standard feature for every managed hosting plan, and we take a full backup at least every 6 hours (every hour with the Enterprise care pack upgrade).

If you need a single file, we can locate and restore it for you within minutes. If you need a full server restored, we can restore that rapidly too. Our backup system can restore your data 10x quicker than a legacy tape based backup solution still used by many of our competitors and corporate IT environments.

Comprehensive SLA

Your clients have come to expect a high quality service from you - consistently delivered on every project you run for them. You need to be sure that the hosting maintains your high standards. This risk exists irrespective of where the client hosts. Eliminiate the risk completely by hosting with Layershift for every project.

Our SLA fills the gaps other providers cheekily miss out with their frustrating loopholes! We share your commitment and passion to high quality service, and we stand right behind it with our comprehensive SLA.

Working With You

Hosting with your client's in-house IT team is often a difficult and painful process for everyone. Corporate IT understandably focus on the desktop needs of their business, and although they're very skilled in all manner of Windows desktop, Active Directory, and Microsoft Exchange type issues, they typically have very little experience when it comes to web hosting servers.

Usually there's little (if any) in-house knowledge of Linux based server platforms at all, and that severely limits your development as you immediately become cornered into developing for an unfamiliar Windows hosting platform.

The ongoing development and support then becomes an issue. Although the in-house IT team know about Windows servers, they haven't had to maintain and configure IIS before so everything takes a long time to configure, or troubleshoot.

Not to mention the notorious Windows server patching cycle which unfortunately takes the website offline for lengthy update processes every month whilst the server endures multiple reboots (see our care packs to learn how we avoid this problem on our enterprise-grade Linux platforms with rebootless updates!).

Working with Layershift is very different. Layershift work with you, not against you. We're here to provide you and your clients with the best possible service; you can retain the direct relationship with your customer, backed by our experienced technical support and systems administration, or your customer can buy directly from us with you as an authorised account contact. Either way you can enjoy working directly with our legendary support team on every project. Whatever works best for you and your client!

Hosting Provider	Agency powered by Layershift	Layershift	In-house IT
Hosting technical support	Agency supported by layershift	Layershift	In-house IT vs Agency conflicts!
Website application code support	Agency	Agency	Agency
Consistent known hosting environment for every project (avoid surprises and delays)			Every client's in-house IT hosting capability, software stack, availability, expertise, and technical experience is very different. Can cause significant cost overrun!
Single technical team learns your needs and works with you across multiple projects - highly efficient and responsive service			Need to establish new working relationship during each project engagement. Potential for conflict, delays, and antagonism.
Flexible server environments designed specifically for web hosting			Focus is corporate IT needs (desktop, and supporting desktop server applications). Limited understanding of web hosting. Large part of "in-house IT" outsourced so even the in-house IT team have little understanding of the deployment infrastructure.
24/7/365 system administration team (Gives you the flexibility to work out of hours to meet project deadlines)			Corporate IT work standard office hours; you can't get prompt help when needed.
Rapid deployment of new systems to support evolving or unexpected project growth in a timely manner			Long procurement process to source new hardware, long lead time - unforeseen project delays and lost market opportunity.
On-site spares for immediate component replacement	Full system spares on-site for immediate deployment	Full system spares on-site for immediate deployment	Over-reliance on maintenance contracts. Ineffective for prompt 24/7 diagnosis and resolution. Your client cannot afford their website offline for a day whilst components ship around the country.

Supporting Growth

Your clients engaged your services to facilitate explosive growth. When your strategy pays off and website traffic and conversions rocket, you need to know the hosting service is up to the job.

Most hosting services require time consuming migrations and costly downtime to upgrade, but all Layershift hosting solutions are fully scalable. With a zero-downtime scaling proposition, you know that the hosting service can easily grow to meet ever more visitors and sales conversions.

Layershift successfully scale start-up projects from inception on our Cloud VPS platform through to large scale operation on our Complex hosting suite; we can provide your clients with flexible and robust hosting as you propel their online venture forwards!