The hosting market is becoming more and more dense, business competition is growing and providers have to find more sophisticated ways to attract customers and keep them using their services. High performance servers, dependable technical support available at any time, an intuitive UI with a wide stack of useful features and on-trend solutions, affordable pricing - all are must have for continuous hosting business growth.
Some hosting providers do a great job in this direction and prove their reliable status year after year. In this article we’d like to share an inspiring use case of a Jelastic Hosting Partner, that expanded their business to provide their services from 3 continents: Europe, North America and Asia. Meet Damien Ransome, Co-Founder and Director of Layershift Limited.
How would you describe Layershift and its business?
We are the UK based managed hosting provider and we provide ops capabilities for small to medium size businesses.
How are you different compared to AWS and other hosting providers?
Amazon is just an infrastructure company. For your developers to make use of that infrastructure you still need a big ops team behind you to make it do something. For example, if your developers need to produce an application that’s going to get the business from one point here to another point there, you can think of that application as a car. Your developers are crafting the bodywork, the seats, and all the other things you need inside that car for it to be your perfect application. Then at the end of it all, to actually make that car move, you need an engine and that’s basically the server infrastructure. At Amazon, to have that engine, there are over 70 different services you have to put together to create that; developers are not engine guys, they don’t know how that works, they only know about the rest of the car.
If you don’t have that ops team there’s no real way to make Amazon work. 
How does Jelastic help your customers?
Using the same engine analogy it’s important to remember that every application needs its own specific type of engine.
Jelastic provides developers with easy access to the exact engine that they need, without that ops team requirement. For example, one of our customers runs one of the most visited websites globally in the world, (in Alexa global top 10k) and they do that with only two developers.
What does Jelastic add for you as a hosting provider?
Before Jelastic we were primarily a VPS provider. We provided just the basic LAMP stack via the Plesk control panel. That works fine for a single server, or for a single website solution. If you needed more like load balancer let’s say, we did offer that, but it was quite a lot of effort for us to provision and maintain that service.
With Jelastic we can do that for our customers really easily; it’s just a few clicks, and maintaining that is also really easy; we can even extend it to whatever each individual customer needs.
How do you see Layershift and Jelastic partnership going on forward?
We’ve partnered with Jelastic for five years now and during that time we found them really easy to work with and we collaborated very closely on many of the features already on the platform today.
Our customers really love the service and all the benefits that it gives them. We are looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with the Jelastic team and to many more successful years of growth to come.
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