How many domains can I host?

This is limited by 2 things:

• Server resources (which Cloud VPS plan you purchase)
• Plesk Panel licensing

You can upgrade to a higher spec. server at any time to add more resources as you add more domains / your sites' demands grow.

We include a 10 domain Plesk Web Admin edition license free with each server.
You may upgrade to a 30 domain Web Pro (+£6.99/month)(+$9.99/month) or unlimited domain Web Host edition (+£14.99/month)¹(+$19.99/month)¹ license at any time.

Do you limit the number of subdomains / databases / email accounts etc.?

There is no limit to the number of subdomains, domain aliases, databases, mailboxes, mail redirects or FTP accounts you can create; the only limits are server resources (RAM, disk space, CPU etc.), and the number of domains (due to Plesk licensing - see above).

Can you help migrate my sites to Layershift?

Yes! Our expert migration team can migrate any number of websites to your new Layershift server completely free of charge! We're available 24x7 to help with any questions or problems you may have during the process. Our team are experts at migrating from Plesk, cPanel, DirectAdmin and custom hosting services.

Simply contact our support team after purchasing your server and they'll help you get started!

What is the difference between your Care Packs?

Key differences are highlighted in the selection panel above. See the full comparison for more details.

Can I use my VPS to sell hosting to my clients?

Yes! By default we deploy Plesk Panel in 'Power User' mode, which makes it easy to host sites for your own organisation - but our 24x7 technical support team can switch you to 'Service Provider' mode (free) if you wish to configure hosting plans for each of your domains / customers and sell hosting on your server.

'Service Provider' mode is only available with the 30+ domain Plesk license options (Web Pro and Web Host editions).

'Reseller Management' (to sell reseller hosting accounts) is only available with the unlimited domain Plesk license option (Web Host edition).

What server management and support do you offer?

We provide a truly complete service covering every aspect of server administration leaving you to concentrate on your websites and business instead of babysitting a server. It includes all pre-installed software issues such as:

• Initial installation and configuration
• Ongoing maintenance, security hardening, and troubleshooting
• Re-configuration and tuning/optimisation
• Upgrades and recompilations
• Installation of additional software/modules

If you have any specific questions or requirements our friendly sales team will be happy to advise you

What do you mean by proactive monitoring?

All of our services include advanced, proactive monitoring. This extensive multi-faceted monitoring covers everything including public/private network connectivity, power, physical environment (temperature, humidity, fire, intrusion, etc.) and platform health right down to your individual server services, health and resources. Our expert engineers monitor and react to these alerts on a 24x7x365 basis without your intervention - so you can rest easy.

Our monitoring consists of multiple layers:

• Plesk Watchdog is pre-installed to automatically monitor, notify and restart failed services with event logging from inside your VPS.
• A proprietary advanced monitoring system remotely monitors all critical web services and notifies our 24x7x365 support team. Custom rulesets are available upon request for customers using our Enhanced or Enterprise Care Pack.
• A bespoke compliance system verifies the integrity of your applications, compliance with security policies, and compliance with our stringent quality and performance standards. Non-compliance is automatically rectified where possible, and our 24x7x365 support team are notified where necessary such as when there is repeated non-compliance.
• Off-site network and infrastructure monitoring ensures availability of all critical infrastructure and any defects are immediately and automatically escalated to appropriate management and engineering teams.

Do you backup my data?

Backups are included free of charge and without any storage limits. We take backups at least 4 times per day (every 6 hours) and keep a copy of your backups for 7 to 14 days (depending on your selected Care Pack) giving you up to 56 individual restore points.

All backups are stored on our secure private backup network which is completely isolated from customers' services. Our backup system provides regular system snapshots using a highly sophisticated incremental backup mechanism. This minimises the amount of load placed on your system during the backup process such that there is no noticeable impact to server performance.

Restores are available free of charge 24x7x365 via our support team who will manage the process for you to ensure the fastest and most successful recovery.

Why our server backups are better

How do you install updates and ensure my server is secure?

We perform regular security updates for the OS and pre-installed software in accordance with the Care Pack level for your subscription. For example, we guarantee to install critical updates within 1-7 days (in practice we install these much more quickly in most cases, as soon as the updates are verified by our Quality Assurance team).

We install non-stop kernel updates with critical patches implemented within hours to ensure your service is protected, and without the need to schedule downtime to reboot your server: most of our competitors cannot offer this advanced technology.

Can I upgrade / downgrade my plan? Is there any downtime?

Upgrade instantly at any time via our control panel without downtime thanks to our advanced Non-stop Upgrade™ Technology. Downgrades are performed on request by our billing team, after assessment of your server's resource needs to ensure server stability.

Can I add additional traffic / data transfer?

We include generous traffic allowances as standard. Once you reach 80% and 100% traffic usage our systems are setup to automatically send you an email notification. We recommend if you expect the traffic levels to continue that you either upgrade to a higher plan with a higher traffic allowance or contact our friendly sales team to discuss buying additional blocks of traffic in bulk.

Can I add additional RAM?

We offer a wide range of plans from 1GB to 32GB RAM as standard ready for instant provisioning, with custom options available for up to at least 128GB RAM available on request from our friendly sales team. Custom RAM upgrades are only available above 32GB.

Can I add additional disk space?

Our plans include generous disk allocations from 60GB to 750GB disk space as standard ready for instant provisioning. If you need even more, custom options are available for up to at least 10TB disk space on request from our friendly sales team. Disk space upgrades are also available in the upgrade centre inside the My Layershift control panel for your existing plan.

What if I outgrow the plans on your website?

We offer a wide range of hosting services from individual Cloud VPS's up through our Cloud VPS Extreme range to multiple bespoke load-balanced servers, and our highly scalable Jelastic PaaS platform. If you expect to outgrow our Cloud VPS Extreme services or would like to discuss your requirements in detail, please contact our friendly sales team and we'll be happy to advise.

Which control panel do you offer?

We include the industry-leading Plesk Panel free of charge. Our technical team are Plesk experts with many years experience working with and maintaining it. This in-depth experience ensures that our entire team have advanced knowledge of all aspects of Plesk, rather than only having a mediocre expertise in a number of different panels.

We offer Plesk as it uses less RAM, is more secure, and more reliable than alternative options we have tested.

On other panels many packages are replaced with custom versions, whilst Plesk generally prefers to keep standard OS versions - resulting in faster, more widely tested, security updates, and often (if/where necessary) we can safely replace system packages without conflicts.

Can I use an alternative control panel?

We only offer Plesk Panel on our Cloud VPS range, and Jelastic for our Jelastic PaaS services.

Customers migrating from competing control panels such as cPanel or DirectAdmin are usually pleasantly surprised at the quality and ease of use of the latest versions of Plesk compared to competing panels.

If you haven't used Plesk for a while we strongly encourage you to contact our friendly sales team to ask for a demonstration as the latest versions of Plesk are very powerful, versatile and intuitive. We're sure you'll love what you find!

Do you offer 1 click application install?

We include Plesk Panel one-click applications feature as standard. This gives you the ability to easily install hundreds of the the latest popular open-source apps onto your server, including Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento.

Once deployed, your application can be configured for automatic updates when a new version is released, to ensure your application is fully up-to-date and secure.

Which versions of CentOS, Plesk, PHP and MySQL do you support?

Our Cloud VPS range comes with the latest versions of CentOS Enterprise Linux 7, Plesk 17.8, PHP 5.4, PHP 5.6, PHP 7.0, PHP 7.1, PHP 7.2, PHP 7.3 and MariaDB 10.2 as standard.

What scripting technologies can I use?

You can use PHP, Perl and Python as standard. Additional software can be installed upon request, simply contact our friendly sales team with your requirements and we can confirm if this is possible.

What database server is included?

We include MariaDB 10.2 (drop-in enhanced replacement for MySQL) as standard. PostgreSQL is also available via our sales team.

Larger applications may prefer to use a Cloud VPS / Cloud VPS Extreme as a dedicated database server, fully integrated with the Plesk Panel on another Cloud VPS / Cloud VPS Extreme in a dedicated web server role. Please contact our friendly sales team for further details and volume discount options.

Can I use multiple versions of PHP on a single server?

Yes! We support multiple versions of PHP on a single server.

What type of access do you provide? Do I get SSH? FTP?

Yes! You can easily use per-webspace FTP, FTP-SSH (SFTP) and SSH access by enabling this inside the control panel.

As our services are truly comprehensively Fully Managed, we do not offer root access - you don't need it! We manage all aspects of your server environment to ensure we always know everything about all configuration changes and software installed. This way we can keep it running safely and security for you.

Anything that needs to be performed on the server itself is our responsibility to handle on your behalf and is included free of charge. There's no additional charge for our system admin time - unlike other providers.

Do you include email services?

Yes, all services include a full email server with POP3, IMAP, and SMTP functionality with optional anti-virus and anti-spam.

What anti-spam options do you provide?

We include SpamAssassin free of charge on all servers. This helps to prevent spam and its most valued feature is its ability to apply a spam score to an email based on the contents of the email. User-configurable thresholds allow spam to be instantly deleted or simply filtered to a 'junk mail' folder for review.

What anti-virus options do you provide?

We offer the industry-leading Kaspersky antivirus solution. Kaspersky protects unlimited mailboxes on your server against over 8 million different viruses and variants.

Do you offer webmail?

We offer a choice between Roundcube and Horde webmail clients. These are fully integrated with Plesk Panel and can be selected on a per-domain basis.

Where is my data physically stored?

Your server always remains in your chosen region.
(Your current selection is: United KingdomChicagoSingapore)

If you buy a server in our UK datacentre, it will always remain in the UK. Similarly if you buy a server in Singapore, it will always remain in Singapore. This ensures hassle-free legal compliance and clarity, which is often missing from other services.

What specification hardware do you use?

We use a variety of server specifications; the beauty of virtualisation is this doesn't make a substantive difference to your individual VPS - more powerful hardware simply hosts more customers. However, our latest servers use 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6136 12-core CPUs (48 logical cores), 256GB DDR4 RAM and NVMe based (ultra high performance) SSD storage in a very fast RAID 10 configuration with Gbit and 10Gbit connectivity.

What is Intelligent RAM™?

Our Intelligent RAM™ minimises the amount of RAM your VPS needs. This highly advanced technology constantly monitors all VPS's on a server; if multiple VPS's load the same application into memory, your individual memory usage is automatically reduced to just a fraction whilst maintaining a 100% security isolation layer between each individual Cloud VPS.

On average, we estimate you effectively get 3-5x the stated amount of RAM as Intelligent RAM™ de-duplicates across the platform. For example if you buy a 1GB Intelligent RAM™ Cloud VPS, it behaves similarly to a server with between 3GB - 5GB traditional RAM.

This allows your Cloud VPS to handle significantly more workload at a lower cost.

How much CPU do I get?

CPU power is determined by the vCPU limit for each plan. More vCPUs provide more CPU power for your server, meaning your websites (particularly heavy applications) run and load more quickly.

A vCPU is a logical core of an Intel® Xeon® processor with Intel® Turbo Boost Technology. Your server has full access to up to 32 vCPUs (depending on your selected plan). Each plan is designed to offer the perfect amount of CPU power to complement its RAM (and other low-level resource guarantees).

How many VPS's do you host per physical server?

As a pioneer of container virtualization hosting (since 2004), we have a vast amount of experience in highly reliable cloud hosting platforms, and monitor our infrastructure 24x7x365 to maintain excellent service quality.

VPS's are automatically migrated between physical servers according to hardware resource availability and plan specifications to ensure that each Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme server enjoys ultra high performance reliability.

Our Cloud VPS range supports these features as standard:

Scripting and Database Engine

• MariaDB 10.2 database server
• PostgreSQL (optional)
• PHP 5.4, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3
• PHP FPM (via NGINX or Apache)
• Apache mod_rewrite
• .htaccess support
• php.ini support
• Perl
• Python

Mail

• IMAP and POP3 incoming mail
• SMTP outgoing mail
• Webmail (Roundcube and Horde)
• Anti-virus protection (optional)
• Anti-spam filtering (optional)

Features and Administration

• Unlimited Subdomains
• Unlimited domain aliases
• Unlimited domain forwarding
• Cron (scheduled tasks)
• SSL certificate support
• Static IP addressing
• Plesk
• VPN tunnel for secure administration
• Web server log access
• Traffic statistics reports
• User level SSH (No need for root, we handle everything!)
• FTP and FTP-SSL access
• Regular automated backups

Performance and Network

• Guaranteed RAM, CPU, disk I/O
• Redundant network connectivity (BGP and VRRP)
• High performance gigabit network ports
• Intel® Xeon® multi-core high performance server CPU's
• High speed DDR4 RAM with ECC technology to maintain data integrity
• Ultra high speed SSD arrays provide safe and fast access to your data

DNS Hosting

We offer three options for nameservers:

• Using pre-configured nameservers on your VPS (recommended); these can be used as your own private-branded DNS servers and are automatically managed by Plesk Panel.
• Using our redundant DNS cluster; you will need to manually setup records for these via our control panel.
• Using external nameservers; you are responsible for setting these up, but our support team will be happy to help you.

What payment options do you provide / accept?

We accept all major international debit and credit cards including Visa, Mastercard, American Express. Additionally, we accept payments via PayPal (verified accounts only) and via bank transfer (for annual or higher value monthly payments only).

What billing periods are available?

We offer monthly and annual billing cycles; you can select the most appropriate billing period for you when ordering your Cloud VPS and change this at any time via our control panel.

Is there a minimum contract period?

No! There is no minimum contract period because we believe in the quality of our service. You are only committed to your chosen billing period (monthly or annual).

If you wish to cancel, simply submit a termination request with us via the control panel at least 7 days before your renewal date and your server will not be renewed.

Do you offer domain registration services?

Yes, we support registration / transfer of all major domain extensions. See domain name registration and transfer pricing.

Do you sell SSL certificates and Trust Logos?

Yes, we provide and install a wide range of SSL certificates and can offer bundled or separate Trust Logos through our partnerships with GeoTrust, Comodo and Symantec at discounted prices. Please contact our sales team for assistance.

Do you have a referral / reseller scheme?

We are currently working on implementing a formal referral/reseller scheme. In the meantime, we welcome you to refer customers to us, or to resell our services, please simply contact our sales team for more information on referral fees and discounts available to you.

How long have you been in the industry?

We have been providing high-quality managed hosting services since 2001 through globally reaching services in the UK, USA and Singapore.

Our team of virtualisation and hosting industry professionals have a strong focus on end-to-end excellence in all aspects of the company, from infrastructure through to our renowned technical support service and customer experience, delivering exceptionally high customer satisfaction.

How satisfied are your customers?

We invite all customers to rate every interaction with our support teams; our average rating for 2012 was 9.73 / 10 and in 2013 it was 9.74 / 10. We publish our independently-verified support rating live on our testimonials page together with a selection of customer testimonials and support feedback comments.

Where are your offices?

Our Global Headquarters is located in Manchester, UK. Our datacentres are located in Europe (Manchester, UK), North America (Chicago, USA) and Asia (Singapore) and we have a Technology Centre in CEE (Cluj-Napoca, Romania). Our friendly staff are available to help you around the clock!