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Layer7 Review after using them for nearly a year
Disclaimer: This review isn't endorsed/pre-approved by @layer7 and I'm not getting any benefits by posting it - just posting my own experience.
Well, as the title says, I've been using @layer7 for nearly a year, and I'm very happy with my VPSes I have from them. I first saw an offer from them on LET in a Requests thread, looked what else they offer and asked them a few questions, and bought a VPS (with 1 TB HDD in Frankfurt) from them the next day (8th February 2024). While there was an initial deployment problem, they solved it within 2 hours on the weekend. Because I needed a faster VPS a few months later (the first one has a E5-2650L v4 CPU, which is absolutely sufficient for my backup purposes, but not that well suited for running multiple containers with desktop environments on it) and was quite happy with my first one, I bought a Ryzen VPS in France with 7950X3D CPU. A few months later, I also bought an Intel Xeon VPS in France from them, and a week after that they announced a migration of the 7950X3D VPS to a 5995WX CPU, and, because the other CPU is slower single core, they increased the cores, but also offered to migrate to Germany, or to get a pro rata refund (I choose to simply be migrated to the other CPU).
I've opened a lot of tickets with them (sorry for that), but all were resolved quite fast, and the support was always quite friendly.
While they do some things differently than most, I like it to be honest. They have not-that-high IO limits, but you can expect to reach those speeds at any time. They also don't have a TOS/AGB, but they say that they simply allow anything allowed by law.
They have an own management panel (integrated into WHMCS), which isn't that fast, but it works and gets the job done. They recently even added scheduled backups (and upgraded my first VM from 1 backup slot to 5, which is very nice because the add-on HDD is backed up as well).
The servers I have aren't available anymore, only bigger ones (but very configurable) are, I think that's because of IP pricing. They also now have the option to get a free 48h test server, while that's nice of course, I'm not entirely sure how that'll work out abuse-wise.
HetrixTools stats (only monitored it starting from April though, and it could be that the real availability is a bit higher because I might have forgotten to enable maintenance mode at the beginning when I started using HetrixTools):
They don't have a looking glass AFAIK, but I'm hosting one in Frankfurt and Paris (mainly because I was bored when I coded it).
If I forgot to mention an important aspect, feel free to ask.
TL;DR: IMHO they're a great small provider, and I would absolutely recommend them.
Comments
any $7 deals?
They don't do that if I remember.
But yeah, they are pretty solid.
Hi,
thank you for the heart attack being notified about someone doing/publish a review your hard work.
As to the test servers:
There are port limitations in place to avoid toooo easy/comfortable abusing. But yes, its a risk. Lets see if / how much it will be abused and if / how much we will be able to compensate this.
In worst case this offer will have to be deactivated again. But for now, you can just get a test server and then simply upgrade to the equivalent paid plan. No need to reinstall or what ever the server.
The CPU's of the Intel stuff in germany is now also SP Gold and no 2650Lv4 anymore.
And yes, we prefer giving customers a lower guaranteed amount of IO speed instead of a higher shared amount of IO speed. For me its simply better if someone knows what he/she can count on compared to hope that with time or during rush hours the speed will suddenly unexpected break down.
The IO Limits are communicated on the website, just like the minimum CPU model. So everyone can make an own picture if this is enough for the usecase or not.
I am actually wondering a bit where this 5 minuets accumulated downtime in france for the year 2025 came from.... cant remember there were issues.
If you experience stuff like this, if possible, make a traceroute and/or mtr and open a ticket.
I assume the issues come from the upstream, but maybe its something with our network. At least it should be better actually -- want to have at least this 99,9%
I read good words about @layer7 here.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
I have just started receiving the service and have been waiting for the distribution of new server packages for about 2-3 weeks. My first experiences are worth the money. In the 1-month period, all my e-mails and support requests were answered within 1-2 hours at the latest. I am grateful for the quality and transparent service provided. Thx
I've been using them for just about 10 months in France, Ryzen cpu, and would echo the same, a great smaller provider. Had one outage due to a node issue, they instantly offered a new server of the same type in Germany or an Epyc in France as they would need a few days to work on the problem / France isn't their main location (when they switched from Ryzen's to Threadrippers). I declined alternatives since I didn't need it to be back up quickly, they fixed it a few days later and gave ~3 months of free service
Can I use it as a seedbox?
it's a pity that positive reviews always attract twilight designs. that's why i'm holding back more and more with recommendations.
Agree! I want to suggest that they work on their overall Website/ClientArea design & UI, to look more modern, but I think they are focusing on the features/stability which is more important TBH.
I think yes. @layer7 pls confirm?
Hi,
hrhr i needed to read that 3 times to understand that you did not wait 2-3 weeks for paid packages to be delivered but that you waited 2-3 weeks until we changed our product portfolio. Already again near heart attack ^^;
Please dont remember me of that. We got fully caught in this asrockrack board issue. They have been dying so fast.. could not catch up with replacements and finally decided not to provide that anymore in france and its for us costy and time consuming to do there anything.
in general you can run what ever is:
We are in general no abuse friendly host. So if you plan to seed something that has copyright issues or what ever, then we are not a good host. Then, by the way, germany and france are in general no good locations for that. For this, eastern european countries are usually the better choice.
In general we are a bit doomed with the WHMCS engine here. Its actually quiet a nightmare as it wont allow multiple actions at once. So you have to do it one by one, and as a result quiet SLOW. Quiet horror actually. But for the workload to change the billing system to improve that, the pain is not yet high enough.
And yes, its looks are like.... well better lets not talk about looks. Here are working sysadmins and programmers -- no UI designers
So the result you can see ^^;. But also here, WHMCS has some limitations / playrules. If we would add to a slow engine a very nice looking design, i assume things wont improve speedwise. So for now, we focus on more useful features and reliability improvements. WHMCS as well as the Proxmox API makes this hard enough anyway.
But you are right, its something that could be improved. As soon as other things are done, we will aim to improve that aswell. Thanks for the feedback!
Sounds like it's time for some 7$/y VPS deals @layer7
Hi,
in general no problem, here you are:
1 Core @ 10% CPU speed
512 MB RAM
5 GB disk @ 10 MB/s diskspeed & 10 IOPS
10 Mbit/s portspeed incl. traffic
1x IPv6 /64 network
Can I run DeepSeek-R1 on it ?
Add a NAT IPv4 and you'll be able to sell the package.
I have (and had) a few layer7 vps, and while I agree with most of this, the uptime has been annoying for my business recently. There was a few days where their entire network was offline without any notice. I used their vps for a few management things, and this downtime caused problems. I had to cancel with them after that.
Hi,
sure. The good with us is, that you can do anything within the resource limits there are. If you use them fully, its your good right. You pay for that.
I am sorry, but this kind of package makes 0 sense economically to sell ( with or without IPv4 NAT ). So in the near future we wont give love to develop a product thats from the beginning doomed to be a fail.
Its a bit hard to comment this.
If i understand you right, you claim that you had and have servers with us, but you have been recently disappointed with the uptime and claim that our entire network was offline for "a few days".
Aside of the fact that the uptime monitoring of @lukast__ actually contradicts this statement, its actually obviously nonsense that a hoster's entire network is multiple days down without anyone here in the forum would report this, as we are active here.
I also dont remember a ticket of a customer who reported "days of downtime of the entire network".
IF you are a customer and IF you have technical issues ( no matter if for days or hours or even minuets ) please open a ticket and attach a traceroute or better MTR so we can have a look into that issue.
What ever problem you might have ( giving the possibility that you are a customer and have problems ) if you dont let us know about it then most probably nothing will improve.
7 tokens / year.
I tried to open a ticket but your entire website was inaccessible as well. This was not just an issue limited to me, it was my other servers (as it was used as a redis server as well), which simply could not connect to it. It was around December 28th. I no longer have the server, but it was in your France location.
According the the uptime test that is located here: https://status.tau.tz/report/uptime/2024-12/bfc24e7e742ddc3c2b9d3a785340e86a/, what I am saying is accurate, but my server, was down for much longer than that. I regretfully do not have hetrix or uptime monitoring at the time, but my genuine experience is that it was down for much longer than 3 hours that time. At that point, I could not stay with Layer7 for my business which REQUIRES redis to have a much higher uptime than that as it is core to our service.. The month of December is 99.5139% according to the monitoring above, which is much too low for my purposes (even though my server's downtime is much lower, likely around 99.1 or high 98, based on my experience). I don't dislike Layer7 and I still use them personally, but for business uses, I would not recommend.
My original statement "days at a time" is somewhat inaccurate, but it was around 12 hours for me, and I switched around hour 2.
As soon as I found it was back up, I canceled the server, and switched to somewhere else.
Product ID: 2611 if you want to look it up...
Buy the $7 package there, I need it, waiting for reply
I have purchased a 4C8H machine and am using it
Thought there was a new flash sale deal...
Hi,
thank you for providing some identification info.
From what i can see:
The order ID you pasted belongs to a service that was in germany - frankfurt/main ( and not in france - paris ).
No ticket was opened for any downtime of this (or any other ) service
The service was not cancelled, but simply not paid anymore
Since no ticket was opened and since especially for the FRA1 location in germany there is no downtime known, i have no chance to reconstruct what might or might not could have been the problem.
A downtime of "the entire network" of "around 12h" would not have been unnoticed.
So if ever, it might be that you had a problem with your server. But what/why exactly, no idea and no chance to find it out now.
IF you have issues with services, please open a ticket. Even if you anyway plan that you dont want to use it anymore, because its just not good enough for you.
We are really a very very fair provider, giving feel-able rewards if there really was a problem with our infrastructure / service.
So even you would not like to use this service anymore, you have good chances to get even for past working services refunds in cash to somehow compensate the problems that were connected with the problem, even we are strictly spoken not obliged to do so.
That makes even more sense if you have other services with us and want to keep them, so we could just give you free time for the other services.
At the end, informing us about issues with our infrastructure, will just always benefit you.
So please, inform us as soon as possible. Especially if you know us from this forum, you could PM me. You could write on telegram with us. Even if from your perspective everything is down from our network.
Any useful feedback is always welcome
Please forgive me. I am always ready to make good prices. But please not with this kind of micro deals. They have 0 meat on the bones ;-;
I could confirm this. I have 4 vms in Frankfurt.
They are connected through SSH on tmux session and have no broken pipeline for about 2 month.
Just curious. You had a lot of vps options (epyc, ryzen, intel), but now i see only few of them. Why? Out of stock?
Layer 7 just literally stole 135 dollars from me. No response to messages of any kind definitely services of any kind but surely took my money and gave me nothing back.
@lukast__
A somewhat uncommon style but a good and interesting review of what seems to be a very decent provider (@layer7). Thank you!
Hi,
that would be actually quiet uncommon for us. What makes you think we take money without providing service?
Can you please identify yourself here or via private message, so i have a chance to get an idea what you are talking about?
sorry, i didnt see this message. Please tag me, or i will miss message for basically sure.
Even its a bit late: I dont remember what was the situation in april, but i think we changed the portfolio around this time. Epyc and Intel are in.
Ryzen was removed because of technical reasons, that have been solved already and will be reintroduced in the coming weeks.