Softlayer CloudLayer Computing Instance Review

Gone are the days when you needed to pay huge monthly bills to rent a server. Now you can rent a server on hourly basis. Yes, its true ! The new buzzz among web hosting industry is Cloud Hosting. Using cloud hosting select only the resources you need Core, RAM,  HDD, OS etc. & within 2 minutes you are ready to go ! Pay only for what you use.

Well, I was curious about Cloud Hosting so I ordered a Cloud server from softlayer yesterday. Named as CCI (CloudLayer Computing Instance) by Softlayer. Ordered the Cloud Server with configuration as below:

1×2.0 GHz core

1 GB RAM

25 GB SAN Storage

4 Public IP address

Windows Server 2008 Standard OS

1 GBPS Public Port

Which costs $0.19/hour +$1.00 setup fees.

Incoming bandwidth is free & all outgoing bandwidth is charged at $0.10/GB

After ordering my CCI  (cloud server) was ready within 15 minutes & I was able to use it.

I opened the remote desktop downloaded some huge files from rapidshare , the speed was super fast. Upload / Download speed at 4.2mbps average.

I was charged approx $1.50 for 4 hrs with 5 GB data transfer. They do not accept paypal for cloud servers for new users. If you are a new user then need your to use your credit card so they can charge you for additional hours & bandwidth as well. The hourly rent starts from the time when your cloud server is provisioned regardless if you use it or not and you have to pay outgoing bandwidth charge.

With cloudlayer hosting you can reload the server any time with different Operating System. Create a image of existing Cloud server & clone it on other cloud server.

I will recommend softlayer to anyone who is looking for cloud hosting / server. They are reliable & having rock solid network. You may order your Cloud here http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing/