Loyalty bonuses for trusting us with your hosting
As you browse our new website you will see we’re now focusing our web presence on our two great dependable cloud hosting services, Cloud VPS and Jelastic Cloud, and wanted to offer all of those existing customers something special just in time for the Christmas rush.
Cloud VPS & Extreme – still dependable, but now even better
Like all of our loyal customers know, our Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme range (and its legacy predecessor VPS range) has been a pinnacle of the hosting industry for many years, and we continue to improve our exceptional managed hosting services by pushing these services even further.
All of our Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme customers will now enjoy the following three new benefits, effective immediately, and without any extra charge as a Christmas cloud hosting loyalty bonus from Layershift:
1: Supercharged RAM & CPU
All plans have received a free boost in CPU and most plans extra RAM! More space to grow your visitor numbers, host additional websites and increase your performance with improved page loading times and faster scripts.
Cloud hosting case study: King of Shaves
King of Shaves is the UK’s leading quality shaving and skincare challenger brand, founded in 1993 by Will King and offering a range of innovative products for both men and women.
Since Will King created the Original Shaving Oil in his kitchen back in 1993, King of Shaves now sells a product every three seconds worldwide and is regarded as one of the UK’s most innovative and successful challenger brands.
We spoke with Simon Watson, Head of Design at King of Shaves about how Layershift Managed Cloud Hosting responded to the King’s needs and did everything possible to help make their online Kingdom the greatest of them all.
Simon, who are you and what’s your background?
I formally trained as a Graphic Designer at Middlesex Polytechnic graduating with BA Hons degree in 1991 before starting work for a small corporate design consultancy, Ludden Taylor, in London for five years working with blue chip clients like The BOC Group, Rolls Royce Aerospace, Philip Morris and the EU – we were one of the first studios to produce every piece of work completely on computers (Apple Macs, naturally). I then worked for a design and advertising agency called Ambleglow based in Maidenhead, Berkshire doing a mixture of recruitment and consumer advertising mixed with corporate identity design.
An old school friend was working for a small male toiletries business, KMI – who owned the King of Shaves brand, and asked us to work on a few small projects for them. We started off doing a couple of leaflets and I ended up doing so much work for them that I was head hunted and ended up joining them full-time in 2001. During my time at Ambleglow, in conjunction with a specialist HTML / PHP coder, I designed and built the first major version of the King of Shaves website and online store at www.shave.com – my first proper internet project.
Secure your mailbox with powerful email antivirus protection!
Parallels Premium Antivirus by Dr. Web
If you’re one of our Cloud VPS customers and are looking to protect your hosted cloud email from viruses, you’ve probably heard about Parallels Premium Antivirus by Dr. Web already.
Dr. Web is what keeps your mailbox safe from all the naughty viruses out there. With more than two decades experience (Doctor Web started developing the anti-virus software in the early 1990’s) the developers have come up with a very effective heuristic engine, and comprehensive virus definitions database (over 120,000 definitions, and each individual definition can detect up to thousands of viruses!). Their sophisticated heuristic virus analysing engine with fly-code technology, origins tracing and structural entropy analysis can detect zero-day viruses and other malware before they are even added to the virus database.
Why do I need to use email antivirus?
Research from the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses estimates that the cost of cybercrime amongst its members in 2012 was £4,000 per member on average (around $6,500) of which virus infections were responsible for a staggering 20%!
According to a study in The Guardian, more than 9 million adults in Britain were hacked in the past year. Would you take this chance?
Another thing worth mentioning is spam generated from your computer becoming infected by viruses. It’s common for a virus to ‘hijack’ your computer to send outbound spam – and we all know everyone hates receiving spam! GroupIB, specialists in cyber security, made a recent report about the evolution of spam in the last two years and determined that profits gained worldwide from this activity reached $786 million in 2012. The main products targeted by these spamming campaigns were medicines, drugs or software. What would your customers say if they suddenly received slimming advice from your e-mail account? Not very professional, right? The only thing ‘slimmed’ would be your profits!
How it works
With Dr Web, you get a rapid protection time for all new viruses. You can be confident it’s up to date with hourly updates – critical during any outbreak! Dr. Web’s over 150 R&D staff work around the clock to keep a constant eye on new viruses and respond as soon as something looks questionable, keeping your inbox protected.
Secure webmail hosting with Roundcube and Horde
We have some great news for all of our webmail users! We’ve now introduced Roundcube webmail as the default webmail client for our Cloud VPS range (replacing Atmail open-source which is no longer supported by the developers). And for those of you who prefer to use Horde IMP we’re pleased to say that it was also upgraded to version 5!
These two secure webmail clients are both easy to use, very popular and have a great interface to make your life simpler.
Enhanced secure webmail with Roundcube
Roundcube webmail is very intuitive through its neat drag-and-drop interface.
One of Roundcube’s strongest points is the simplicity of the interface, which is comparable to using a good quality desktop client and brings powerful features usually only typically found in services like Gmail and Outlook.com.
Scalable PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 hosting
You asked for it and now it’s here! It gives us great pleasure to announce full support for PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 hosting across our Cloud VPS and Jelastic scalable hosting services. While PHP version 5.5 is new, PHP 5.4 has been available for some time on our Jelastic scalable PHP platform, but we’ve been eagerly waiting support for multiple PHP versions in the new Plesk 11.5 to launch this across our Cloud VPS range too.
Some of the top new features of PHP 5.4 hosting
- Traits allowing you to horizontally reuse code across independent classes in different class hierarchies
- Improved performance and resource usage optimisation, especially in some large apps
- Short Array Syntax to make it easier to define an array
- Direct de-referencing of function arrays
- Many other improvements such as: enhanced closure binding, ability to use objects as functions, binary number notation, native session handler interface, improved error messages and many bug fixes