About The SoftLayer Company
Since 2005, SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. of Dallas, TX has been offering businesses top notch cloud, dedicated, and managed hosting services and on-demand, global data center. They provide fully automated solutions and self-proclaimed “best-in-class connectivity and technology” to power it all, giving clients security, control, accessibility, and scalability.
This isn't a small-time company: SoftLayer Technologies has customers in 110+ countries, with over 20,000 servers and over 25,000 customers. They are in fact the largest privately owned web hosting company in the world.
In all, there are eleven data centers across the US.
The Good
The web hosting company combines three redundant gigabit network architectures (private, public, and data center-to-data center) into the very first network-within-a-network design available in the industry. This is what makes it so very powerful and well-designed.
Need a new server? No problem. Use the simple customer portal to place your order or manage your services in mere minutes.
When it comes to customer service, they're available for you all day, seven days a week, whether by email, telephone, interactive forum, live chat, or automated support. Overall, customers are very satisfied with the response time to any issues that may arise.
SoftLayer Technologies is known as an industry leader, mainly because of their wide assortment of affordable hosting solutions. Need a solution quick? Choose Express Servers, with two hours or less setup time.
Sought After
If anything is a solid indicator of the value of the company, it's the fact both IBM Corp and EMC Corp are holding discussions to purchase the company. It is estimated the sale of SoftLayer Technologies Inc will bring over $2 billion. Unnamed sources involved in the matter say that SoftLayer is keeping the discussions hush-hush, appointing Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to deal with the sale.
AT&T initiated the sale when they approached SoftLayer exclusively, but no deal was made, and AT&T is no longer part of the process.
Awards
The review website HostReview has given SoftLayer Technologies three awards so far this year: Top 10 Fastest Growing Company for February 2013, as well as Top 10 Best Web Hosting Company in April and March 2013. In August of 2011, SoftLayer Technologies was awarded a spot on Metroplex Technology Business Council's Top five Fastest Growing Tech Companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The Bad
If a company is described as “the best,” how can there be anything bad to say about them? Look to the domains trend and the future sale of the company for answers.
Not many people out there have anything bad to say about the company, but there are those that claim they are ignored when it matters most: when something goes wrong, and the call is placed to tech support. The majority of the scant bad reviews that exist speak to tech support not getting back to them. However, there are hundreds more that dispute this.
It seems odd that such a successful company would be sold so easily. However, if you look at the domains trend which shows how many domains a hosting company has gained or lost from month to month, you'd see that since December 31, 2012, the company has lost a total of 3,373 domains. Could this be one reason the company has decided to sell? No one involved in the process is talking, so it's tough to say.
SoftLayer Technologies: Conclusion
Although the company appears to have lost some business, that doesn't mean they're out of the game. They still provide top-notch products and service for small- to medium-sized businesses all over the world. Trust them to bring you a solid, dependable web hosting service at a competitive price.
Never on hold. Have talked to multiple customer representatives with questions about their services, hosting, WordPress and more. Every time, they are happy to answer questions. Every time, no hold waits, one ring and answer. Every question answered, even when it’s a bit out of their service range.
Amazing hosting provider with almost 0% downtime, I’m very much pleased.
Good Company to work with. Nice Environment.
I have been w Inmotion for years now and as far as service goes I am ALWAYS impressed. Truly, out of every company I have ever dealt with online this company doesn’t mess around when it comes to customer service. 24 hours a day, english, no excuses, no pushing you off or not caring. I am over and over impressed with their customer service.
Hosting Industry is changing the way customers use hosting, customized solutions are more prevalent then traditional plans. Companies have been increasing their product relevance to increase their sales and revenues. Most of the businesses are now preferring cloud services. In the 4th annual Hosting Con Australia Symposium Softlayer was one of the speaker and Australian cloud and hosting was being discussed.