New Plesk Panel 11

As many of you know, we’ve exclusively offered managed hosting services with Parallels Plesk Panel for almost 12 years; starting with our shared hosting services and later with our Managed Cloud VPS, most of our Dedicated Servers and Complex Load-Balanced Hosting services. We find that Plesk helps our customers get the best performance and flexibility from our hosting services. We are very excited about the launch of the all-new Parallels Plesk Panel 11 as it brings some important features we have been eagerly anticipating!

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Care Packs & SLA

As part of our website relaunch last week we decided to refresh our entire range of services. Since introducing our shared hosting range in 2001, and especially our VPS and Dedicated Server range in 2003, we’ve learned a lot about the industry, our customers and the technologies we work with. We believe this is the perfect time for us to update our range to ensure we are providing customers with the best possible service and value for money.

One of the most common concerns (for those who didn’t already know what to expect hosting with Layershift!) from prospective customers was that we didn’t offer an official Managed Hosting Service Level Agreement (SLA) on any of our Plesk VPS or Dedicated Server plans. When we launched these plans almost 9 years ago we were against offering an SLA as virtualization technology was still emerging. Many new providers, or at least providers new to virtualization, are still learning about the subtleties of how to provide this technology in a stable manner which is one reason why they create high profile outages! Those providers see an SLA as a mere marketing tool, but it never made sense to us to offer an SLA on an immature platform, so we didn’t do it. Over the years we have refined our technology to provide stable hosting infrastructure and consistently reliable services so now that the technology is fully proven, offering an SLA finally makes sense!

Instead of simply following our competitors and offering meaningless and weak guarantees on only small parts of their service we decided to go much further and devise a complete range of “care packs” which are bundles of features bolted-on to our services (the first level included as standard!); these comprehensively guarantee our services and reinforce our commitment to providing absolutely the best quality hosting we can.

Highlights of our care packs:

• Up to hourly managed backups with up to 14 days retention offering up to 336 restore points!
• Critical software updates installed in as little as 24 hours
• Regular server tuning & optimization
• Comprehensive network (internal and external), power & physical environment SLA’s
• Hardware & cloud platform health SLA’s
• Intensive system services & health monitoring
• Dynamic resource monitoring
• Rapid, proactive incident response & resolution from our 24×7 support engineers

Full details about our care packs are posted on our website.

With our Cloud VPS range we include our Essential care pack free of charge, with an optional upgrade to our Enhanced care pack (only UK £10/month, Singapore/USA $16.75/month including 33% lifetime discount if ordered when signing up!).

For our Cloud VPS Extreme and new Dedicated Server plans we include the Enhanced care pack free of charge, with an optional upgrade to Enterprise (only UK £50/month, Singapore/USA $80/month including 33% lifetime discount if ordered when signing up!).

If you already have a managed VPS or Dedicated Server subscription with us from before 14th June 2012 we are bundling the Essential care pack for you free of charge (there’s no need to request this) with immediate effect. Upgrades to Enhanced or Enterprise can be requested via our sales team.

We would love to hear your comments and suggestions about how we can improve our care packs and service even further!

New website & services

Our new website, community and this blog have all gone live today, replacing our previous website which has served us well for almost six years. A big THANK YOU to everyone who has worked on this project over the last 10 months – great work!

As is often the case with projects like this every step has taken twice as much time as expected, but we really wanted to make sure we’ve incorporated all of the feedback we’ve gathered from our loyal customers and staff over the past six years and are very happy with the end result.

Please check out our fabulous new website and range of services and let us know what you think!

This is an important step because it allows us to showcase our services and product features fully, which we’ve never really done before, but it’s also important to our customers because we’ve radically reinvented our range of services – we’re now offering what we think are the most competitive and complete Managed Hosting Services around with some great new enhancements!

Here are some of the highlights:

• New range of Cloud VPS and Cloud VPS Extreme products featuring Plesk Panel 10
• New range of Dedicated Server and Complex Hosting products for customers with more bespoke or specialist requirements including high-availability, clustering and load-balancing
• New range of load-balancing, SSL certificates, trust marks and a wider range of domain names
• Introduction of our new ‘Care Pack‘ concept where we bundle a range of exciting new features and an SLA-backed service guarantee across our entire Cloud VPS, Cloud VPS Extreme and Dedicated hosting ranges – this includes some significant free enhancements which we are also rolling out to all existing VPS customers!
• Global coverage with our existing UK and USA and new Singapore managed hosting!

We’ll be posting much more in the coming days and weeks about our new range of services and in-depth discussions about some of the exciting new features and what the changes mean to you.

We’re working very hard to bring even more to you in the near future.

Watch out for the beta launch of a really exciting new service at the beginning of next month!

Let us know what you think!