CloudLayer Storage
13 Mar
CloudLayer Storage Review
General Information
“CloudLayer Storage data is safely stored to SoftLayer’s advanced StorageLayerTM solution, which integrates industry-leading technologies-including FTP/NAS, iSCSI, EVault, and others-into a unified storage environment for the ultimate level of security and reliability.”
Prices
Our Usage
Because of reasons below we decided to test out CloudLayer by using it as more of a download service rather than a file resource for our site.
Our Review
At the time of writing, CloudLayer require you to sign up to a monthly plan, then, after the first month you can move to a Pay As You Go plan. As we were unsure of our usage we decided to switch to Pay As You Go at $0.25/GB Storage and $0.10/GB Bandwidth. The bandwidth charged on CloudLayer is good in comparison to Rackspace and Amazon, although Storage is slightly on the higher side. The question is: Is it worth it?
We had issues signing up to the service, although we believe this was due to a techincal error on the sign up system. There was also an issue receiving their emails which we believe was a one off and that the problem should now be resolved. The Sales team on Live Chat were fantastic although this was shortlived bu the disappointing lack of technical support with no reply to our email query after 2 days (using a different email to the one that was having issues receiving their emails), for this reason we have marked them down.
There are a few main differences between CloudLayer Storage and other Cloud Files services. The first one is that, at the moment, there are no tools (eg Firefox Extensions) available so the only option you have for managing your service is through the CloudLayer Storage Control Panel. The Control Panel is good, and may take a bit of searching at first to find out all the options, but I believe there is a user manual available.
There is one downside (a big one in our opinion) which is that you have to select individual files to ‘Make Public’ rather than having a public container like you do with Rackspace or Amazon. This becomes an issue if you wanted to automatically share all files in a folder or if you upload a large amount of files. So for this reason we were forced to use this storage cloud in a slightly different way than we tested the others and we used it as a download resourse rather than a file resource.
Speed wise CloudLayer appears to be quick and we haven’t experienced any downtime at the time of writing. Speed seems to be very similar to other cloud hosting companies, although have have found uploading via the control panel can be a little slow at times.
The Iphone App – We have also tested the Iphone App and it works a lot like the Control Panel allowing you to upload files straight from your Iphone. You can also view/edit/delete other files you currently have in your account.
More Information
Click here to visit CloudLayer Storage
Screenshots
Layersoft Cloud Storage Screenshot 1
Layersoft Cloud Storage Screenshot 2