04-07-2009, 05:33 AM
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Junior Guru Wannabe
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Scandinavia
Posts: 98
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Softlayer - the European view
NOTE! This review is based on my subjective experience with this service provider. Please take into consideration that each customer experience is unique in nature and can be heavily influenced by circumstances and cultural differences. My reviews are more prone to usability aspects rather than mips and milliseconds.
This review has not been financially influenced by the provider in question.
SOFTLAYER from the European perspective
Background:
I work for a value-added reseller hosting company in the Northern Europe and take care of server provisioning, offer request and service definition for our company needs.
We have used this company for the business hosting needs for over a year - we do yearly offer rounds and move our services should the need arise. Currently we are not hosting with Softlayer.
Experience is based on one dedicated server AMD Opteron 1216 with 4GB, 2x500GB RAID1 and Plesk 100 - location Dallas and Washinton DC facility. Reviewed services; control panel, private networking, help desk, sales support
Overview:
Softlayer has been in business for a while. They offer wide range of servers from single processor multicore to quad processor multicore servers. They have 3 different facilities in U.S; Seattle, Dallas and Washington DC. There are no Softlayer facilities available in Europe, but they do offer services to European customers as well. ( which is not the case with all the U.S based providers )
They offer fully automated services, an integrated control panel, developer API and wide range of software solutions for their server range plus number of other services that we have no experience with.
Privacy Policy:
Standard privacy policy with one side note; Softlayer follows the EU privacy protection laws and participates in the EU Safe Harbor program. This is more important for us Europeans; we are obliged to treat customer data in a specific way. (It's a long story, I'm going to spare you from the details)
Contract terms:
Monthly contract with server cancellation, at the latest 3 days prior the monthly anniversary. The cancellation can be done with the customer control panel. No questions asked - you do get a sales rep email and confirmation enquiry surely, for your own protection.
Installation
The server provisioning was really fast - in a few hours we had fully functioning server available with the specs as ordered and tested. This was a great service, we've had experiences with 10 day provisioning times.
Control Panel ( Customer Portal):
Softlayer customer portal is a comprehensive one. You can handle everything related to your server with a click of a button; reboots, OS reloads, reconfigurations, support requests and sales orders. One of the notable features was the ability to test firewall settings with external scanning provided by SL; easily done with a novice understandable report and suggestions.
You can give different access rights, access levels to users and share the control panel with the system administrators and support people. Overall usability of the control panel is good, navigation is simple, the screen is calm and there are no distractive elements. Softlayer has done a rather good job in handling comprehensive set of features in customer control panel.
For a beginner, the control panel can be a bit overwhelming though - it has been designed for the professional administrators with tens/hundreads of servers and whilst supporting this purpose well, a novice user would feel more confident with more narrow set of features. My preference for the novice user would be the server-centric usability focus; choose the server you manage and then the tasks related to that specific server. Help could be more easily available; there is a comprehensive knowledge base, but task oriented help is not necessarily available where the task is at the control panel.
Out of 10 points, Softlayer deservers 8,5 to the customer portal
Private Network
This is one of the brand marks of the Softlayer. They offer an excellent private network with PPTP & SSL access. The bandwidth is unlimited between you and your servers and even between your servers. You can truly shut down the external traffic to your server and still manage it from the background. The access is granted using PPTP (1 user) or SSL browser access with (Java plugin?). I used the PPTP, so the experience with SSL is limited.
This feature is free, which is exceptional. The true value comes when you have several servers with Softlayer and you interchange data between server. For single server owner this is of a less benefit, but surely a secure feature to access your server. The setup for private networking is seamless, easy to understand for a novice and wins my vote hands down
Out of 10 points, Softlayer deserves 9 for their private networking.
Network
Softlayer network is well connected, a connection to Northern Europe is around 80 - 100 ms from the WDC data center, it is barely noticeable for standard web user. During the year with SL, we did not experience any problems with their network connections. Some minor issues with private networking side ( nothing to do with SL )
Out of 10 points, Softlayer deserves 8 for their network connections to Europe
Help desk
Support ticket system; the response times are adequate, but you can sense that there is a night in the U.S and day in Europe. The response time improves at our night time and the tone tends to get more cheerful in the evenings. The responses were always professional though, and we never had a problem that wasn't resolved in a matter of an hour. The hardware was replaced and problems solved efficiently.
Out of 10 points, Softlayer deserves 8 for their helpdesk (If I were in U.S, I might give a 9)
Sales
Like with any service provider contact their sales before ordering; you might get lucky and get unlisted offers and pricing for your server. Softlayer has a good sales staff, but the service level is not consistent . If you are lucky, you might get a sales person not the "I just working here" - type. Their sales people are cheerful, genuine problem solvers and would like to find you the best alternative - the "I just work here" will read their price list and give you exactly what you asked; ie. they might have a great offer on AMD opteron 1216, but you asked for 1212. You'll get what you asked for - not the great offer available. Reason being, "you never asked".
Out of 10 points, I give 8 for the Softlayer sales.
Server pricing
Softlayer is not cheap and not even competitive always. The have a new outlet for bargain servers, but their pricing seems to start with USD119 what ever the case or name of the bargain is. Before signing-up with them, you should always do your own shopping around.
Out of 10 points, I give 7 for the Softlayer pricing
Conclusion
I would suggest Softlayer to any business owner with some experience and with several dedicated servers. For the novice user, with some reservations - maybe a smaller hosting provider would be better to start with. Their technical service is professional, coherent and they certainly know what they are doing.
Softlayer has an impressive service offering, especially with their private networking, but you need to be prepared to pay for it as well.
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04-07-2009, 05:53 AM
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cout << subtitle;
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: /dev/null
Posts: 3,690
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Very nice review that doesn't just say 10/10 for everything, but is actually based on stats that make sense.
Softlayer is indeed, more expensive than average, for valid reasons in my opinion, they just give too much stuff by standard (VPN to their network, KVMoIP, RescueLayer). As far as sales goes, Amanda is just awesome. 
The only question that I have is, what would it require to get a 9+ for networking? I mean, the distance is quite big and I am actually very happy with the network quality towards them from my location.
PHP Code:
1 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Time-out bij opdracht.
3 9 ms 6 ms 10 ms csw1-vlan201.schoo1.lb.home.nl [213.51.154.34]
4 12 ms 12 ms 9 ms csw1-pc109.tilbu1.nb.home.nl [213.51.157.185]
5 10 ms 10 ms 11 ms tb-rc0001-cr101-ae4-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.9]
6 14 ms 12 ms 13 ms asd-lc0006-cr101-ae5-0.core.as9143.net [213.51.158.18]
7 13 ms 13 ms 14 ms Essent.mpr1.if.ge-2-0-1.ams5.above.net [82.98.250.185
8 13 ms 13 ms 21 ms so-3-1-0.mpr1.ams1.nl.above.net [64.125.31.253]
9 15 ms 12 ms 11 ms xe-1-1-0.er1.ams1.nl.above.net [64.125.25.14]
10 13 ms 69 ms 13 ms PNI.Level3.mpr1.ams1.nl.above.net [62.4.95.214]
11 15 ms 12 ms 12 ms ae-33-51.ebr1.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.129]
12 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.133.90]
13 27 ms 26 ms 25 ms ae-1-100.ebr1.Dusseldorf1.Level3.net [4.69.141.149]
14 28 ms 23 ms 29 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.132.138]
15 104 ms 102 ms 103 ms ae-44-44.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.137.62]
16 102 ms 104 ms 108 ms ae-62-62.csw1.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.146]
17 109 ms 109 ms 118 ms ae-14-69.car4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.68.17.6]
18 105 ms 107 ms 107 ms SOFTLAYER-T.car4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.79.170.174]
19 110 ms 107 ms 108 ms po1.fcr01.wdc01.washingtondc-datacenter.com [208.43.118.134]
20 105 ms 104 ms 103 ms www.wdc01.softlayer.com [208.43.118.51]
Pretty much as good as it can be from here.
Last edited by Robert vd Boorn; 04-07-2009 at 05:58 AM.
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04-07-2009, 06:13 AM
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Junior Guru Wannabe
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Scandinavia
Posts: 98
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Thanks for the comments, Rob.
I tried to compare the service from the European perspective and the delay is surely bigger than with a European providers. If you were looking only U.S based providers for your servers, then SL will do very nicely and deserves 9 for their network, but if you considered EU alternatives then 8 is still good. Customers will barely notice the difference.
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04-07-2009, 06:17 AM
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Junior Guru Wannabe
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: Scandinavia
Posts: 98
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What comes to 10 points - that's magic. There needs to be always room for improvement 
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04-07-2009, 06:23 AM
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cout << subtitle;
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: /dev/null
Posts: 3,690
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eComNow
I tried to compare the service from the European perspective and the delay is surely bigger than with a European providers. If you were looking only U.S based providers for your servers, then SL will do very nicely and deserves 9 for their network, but if you considered EU alternatives then 8 is still good. Customers will barely notice the difference.
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Yea, I agree on that. I said it with this in mind: It will be hard to find anything better in the US if you live in Europe, I didn't compare it to European hosts, because of course the respondse is different there.
PHP Code:
Pinging leaseweb.com [83.149.80.111] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 83.149.80.111: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=59
Reply from 83.149.80.111: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=59
Reply from 83.149.80.111: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=59
Reply from 83.149.80.111: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=59
That will indeed be hard to get to the US. 
Quote:
Originally Posted by eComNow
What comes to 10 points - that's magic. There needs to be always room for improvement |
True.
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04-08-2009, 05:24 AM
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Web Hosting Guru
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 298
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Nice 'rational' review; there should be more like these. Complete but not to long.
Latency will not always be a problem. Imho reliability and stability can cause far more problems. So the USA for European visitors may work very well if you have a stable provider.
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04-08-2009, 05:34 AM
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Community Liaison
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: EU & USA
Posts: 3,622
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Be aware that Softlayer did add Telefonica (at the start of April 2009) to their mix for peering (location Dallas : 10G) and this did affect most of our customers as now routing to Washington DC did go over Dallas, TX and i can tell you we are not very excited about this as the route now goes from AMS -> LON -> NYC -> DALLAS -> WDC
Note that Softlayer staff has been notified about this routing issue and is working to correct this, but from what i understood of the ticket they only work on our provider, which is in my opinion not solving the issue for European customers who have chosen Washington DC for its better latency over i.e. Dallas.
But as said; they are working on it, but i am very curious about the experiences of other europeans on the trace towards Washington DC.
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Last edited by 040Hosting; 04-08-2009 at 05:38 AM.
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04-08-2009, 06:04 AM
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cout << subtitle;
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: /dev/null
Posts: 3,690
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 040Hosting
*cutted*
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Auch, that is a valid point. I've just performed a traceroute from a server in Holland and:
PHP Code:
Tracing route to www.wdc01.softlayer.com [208.43.118.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms XX.XX.XX [X.X.X.X]
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms cn-nawij-is-cr10-po2-1.caiw.net [62.45.63.157]
3 2 ms 2 ms 3 ms cn-asd-kbw-cr11-ten1-1.caiw.net [62.45.254.26]
4 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms xe-7-1-0-0.ams10.ip.tiscali.net [77.67.72.133]
5 19 ms 18 ms 18 ms xe-0-0-0.par70.ip.tiscali.net [89.149.186.153]
6 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms So7-1-0-0-grtparix3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net [213.140.53.145]
7 92 ms 127 ms 92 ms So-3-3-0-0-grtwaseq2.red.telefonica-wholesale.net [84.16.12.34]
8 138 ms 137 ms 138 ms So5-3-0-0-grtdaleq3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net [213.140.36.53]
9 130 ms 129 ms 129 ms SOFTLAYER-6-3-0-0-grtdaleq3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net [84.16.6.198]
10 130 ms 129 ms 130 ms po3.dar02.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com [66.228.118.211]
11 133 ms 150 ms 134 ms te1-3.cer02.wdc01.washintondc-datacenter.com [208.43.118.198]
12 133 ms 134 ms 134 ms po2.fcr01.wdc01.washingtondc-datacenter.com [208.43.118.138]
13 129 ms 130 ms 129 ms www.wdc01.softlayer.com [208.43.118.51]
Trace complete.
10 130 ms 129 ms 130 ms po3.dar02.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com [66.228.118.211]
That is indeed bad. 
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04-08-2009, 06:20 AM
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Web Hosting Master
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,532
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Unfortunately, Telefonica sucks.
tracert www.ukservers.com (from Sao Paulo - Brazil, to London)
Tracing route to www.ukservers.com [94.229.65.132]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 4 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.1
2 * * * Request timed out.
3 33 ms 32 ms 29 ms 200-204-115-1.dsl.telesp.net.br [200.204.115.1]
4 31 ms 30 ms 30 ms 200.204.27.17
5 31 ms 36 ms 34 ms 200-100-3-221.dsl.telesp.net.br [200.100.3.221]
6 30 ms 30 ms 33 ms 201-63-253-138.customer.tdatabrasil.net.br [201.
63.253.138]
7 38 ms 32 ms 33 ms Ge4-3-0-0-grtsaosi2.red.telefonica-wholesale.net
[84.16.11.149]
8 141 ms 140 ms 139 ms So6-2-0-0-grtmiabr4.red.telefonica-wholesale.net
[213.140.36.69]
9 146 ms 174 ms 140 ms So7-0-2-0-grtmiana3.red.telefonica-wholesale.net
[213.140.37.77]
10 175 ms 175 ms 176 ms Xe10-3-0-0- grtdaleq1.red.telefonica-wholesale.ne
t.12.16.84.in-addr.arpa [84.16.12.237]
11 176 ms 175 ms 174 ms sl-st30-dal-.sprintlink.net [144.223.244.197]
12 177 ms 180 ms 181 ms sl-crs2-fw-0-6-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.25
3]
13 203 ms 200 ms 202 ms sl-crs2-dc-0-8-2-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.10
3]
14 203 ms 202 ms 203 ms sl-crs2-rly-0-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.2
20]
15 203 ms 203 ms 204 ms sl-crs1-rly-0-10-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.3.1
82]
16 199 ms 202 ms 197 ms sl-crs1-pen-0-5-2-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.2
11]
17 203 ms 204 ms 203 ms sl-crs2-pen-0-0-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.16.7
3]
18 207 ms 205 ms 210 ms sl-bb21-tuk-11-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.13
9]
19 273 ms 274 ms 275 ms sl-bb21-lon-14-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.24.15]
20 265 ms 266 ms 265 ms sl-bb23-lon-14-0.sprintlink.net [213.206.128.54]
21 274 ms 305 ms 273 ms sl-gw23-lon-15-0.sprintlink.net [213.206.128.63]
22 271 ms 264 ms 460 ms 89.191.196.130
23 267 ms 273 ms 268 ms 195.72.129.125
24 268 ms 267 ms 272 ms iph.ukservers.com [78.110.166.126]
25 267 ms 265 ms 266 ms ns1.ukservers.com [94.229.65.132]
Trace complete.
Last edited by dotHostel; 04-08-2009 at 06:26 AM.
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04-08-2009, 06:24 AM
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Web Hosting Guru
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 298
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Telefonica sucks to almost every destination
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SuperRacks Ltd European Hosting
We serve you with custom services
Visit our website or ask for a custom quote
Quality linux and Windows hosting, servers and collocation
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04-08-2009, 08:15 AM
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Community Liaison
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: EU & USA
Posts: 3,622
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I will not go so far to say telefonica sucks, just the routing isn't optimal in this case, and since softlayer just added Telefonica to their mix it may need some tuning. Hence my remark that we informed softlayers staff on this issue, which are very helpful and probably will resolve this issue as soon as possible.
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04-08-2009, 09:56 AM
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Web Hosting Master
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,532
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 040Hosting
I will not go so far to say telefonica sucks
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I'm a Telefonica customer. Yesterday Telefonica messed their DNS servers and zillions of aDSL users from Sao Paulo were unable to access the Internet the entire day yet Telefonica said the problem was "the Internet". As I run my own DNS servers I didn't know this "outage" until I started to receive phone calls and read news saying "the Internet is down".
Quote:
Originally Posted by 040Hosting
just the routing isn't optimal in this case, and since softlayer just added Telefonica to their mix it may need some tuning. Hence my remark that we informed softlayers staff on this issue, which are very helpful and probably will resolve this issue as soon as possible.
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I guess it is not a question if routing is optimal or not as Telefonica has poor peering.
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04-08-2009, 10:08 AM
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Junior Guru
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Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Savage, MN
Posts: 217
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eComNow
Private Network
This is one of the brand marks of the Softlayer. They offer an excellent private network with PPTP & SSL access. The bandwidth is unlimited between you and your servers and even between your servers. You can truly shut down the external traffic to your server and still manage it from the background. The access is granted using PPTP (1 user) or SSL browser access with (Java plugin?). I used the PPTP, so the experience with SSL is limited.
This feature is free, which is exceptional. The true value comes when you have several servers with Softlayer and you interchange data between server. For single server owner this is of a less benefit, but surely a secure feature to access your server. The setup for private networking is seamless, easy to understand for a novice and wins my vote hands down
Out of 10 points, Softlayer deserves 9 for their private networking.
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As a long-time SoftLayer customer (and a huge fan of their services), I would note that the private network is the one weakness we have seen with them -- they do not provision it to the same extent as the public network, and all the outages we have seen have been private-network related. Some have been scheduled (IOS upgrades), some have been not. On the public network, it seems that they have redundant everything (besides the actual switch that your server is plugged into), so the maintenance does not affect us as much.. on the private network, it appears that they only have a single aggregation router (not redundant), so if it fails or they have to do upgrades, you lose your private connectivity for whichever servers are behind that router.
For a bit of background, we run a pair of HA load balancers and a pair of HA firewalls on the public side, and then load balance to a large pool of servers on the backend network. In our case, the private network is actually more important than the public network. I've worked with SoftLayer to try to get redundant private network connections provisioned.. they can do it, but only from the same switch, which is also behind the same aggregation router. They are going to see if they can change that at some point.
Still a rabid softlayer fan, but just thought I'd note this. 
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04-08-2009, 11:10 AM
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Web Hosting Master
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,532
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Quote:
Originally Posted by natecarlson
As a long-time SoftLayer customer (and a huge fan of their services), I would note that the private network is the one weakness we have seen with them
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I'm sorry to know the private network still presents issues. Long time issues I could say. I can understand your pain. I was one of the first Softlayer customers and I loved the VPN access via private network -- I ran SaaS servers and I only kept open public network port 80. Unfortunately, the private network was plagged with many issues, several posted in the private forum, as Web servers losing connection to database servers, Web servers losing connection to iSCSI storage, NAS slow transfers and errors (including losing everything), and VPN access many times down. I cancelled the server 1 year ago (project ended) but I still recommend SL for everyone searching a top-notch data center.
Last edited by dotHostel; 04-08-2009 at 11:19 AM.
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04-08-2009, 11:16 AM
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Community Liaison
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: EU & USA
Posts: 3,622
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dotHostel
I'm a Telefonica customer. Yesterday Telefonica messed their DNS servers and zillions of aDSL users from Sao Paulo were unable to access the Internet the entire day yet Telefonica said the problem was "the Internet". As I run my own DNS servers I didn't know this "outage" until I started to receive phone calls and read news saying "the Internet is down".
I guess it is not a question if routing is optimal or not as Telefonica has poor peering.
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You might be absolutely right, just that i can't say this from our experience so far, softlayer just added telefonica to the mix and speeds look good from europe to dallas, but the little detour to dallas if you want to go to washington dc is just unasked for.
Just got an update from softlayer they are in contact with Telefonica to solve this issue. Hope they will do so soon.
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