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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is cloud-based DNS/Nameservers?
A: LayerOnline provides globally load-balanced nameservers for its clients’ domains and web hostings so their domains will resolve as fast as possible for all their visitors no matter which continent they are in. It is also a failsafe feature that if one of the nameservers goes down, DNS traffic would automatically get re-routed to another nameserver in the nameserver cluster. What’s more, our cloud DNS/Nameservers are IPv6 ready!

Q: What is cloud CDN Hosting?
A: CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, in simplest terms, is a network of geographically distributed servers used to cache your website contents. Besides the fact that LayerOnline servers utilize Nginx to cache and to handle very large amount of traffic, we also partnered with CloudFlare, the main CDN provider, to offer one-click install of its CDN infrastructure for our users free of charge. In the event that your website goes down due to bad script or human error, both Nginx and CloudFlare will continue to serve your website content to the world until your website is back online, that’s double safety nets for your website.

Q: What is cloud Email Hosting?
A: Gmail is one of the best cloud-based email platforms around. Therefore LayerOnline provides one-click install of Google email for your domain. You would be able to use the same fast Gmail interface to access your domain emails and knowing that your emails are back by one of the best email platforms around.

Q: What is Nginx?
A: Nginx is a scalable, high performance HTTP web server and reverse proxy. It’s the solution to the scalability problem of Apache web server, also known as the C10K problem. Apache is a full featured and well supported web server. Apache create a new process for each connection, this impose a problem when there are hundreds of connections, the server quickly ran out of memory and cause instability or even crash. Nginx uses only one thread to handle all connections, switching between them using event calls to the operating system, effective eliminating the resource starvation problem with process-based web servers.

Q: What is Nginx/Apache hybrid HTTP server?
A: Although Nginx is highly scalable and high performance, it’s not as full featured and well supported as Apache web server, and it is not supported by CPanel, the hosting control panel. Therefore LayerOnline introduces Nginx/Apache hybrid HTTP engine: Nginx as the front end and Apache as the backend. The end result is the combined web server can handle thousands of concurrent requests while supporting all functionality and compatibility of Apache web server.

Q: Does LayerOnline support green hosting?
A: Yes. While our datacenters are located in green-powered states and we also make regular contributions to green energy organizations to offset our operation’s carbon footprint, we don’t stop there, we actually do our part to go further, a lot further.

Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse, Virtually. Beside the fact that we only use energy-star compliant server components, we also use various technologies to enable maximum power savings, such as cpu speed scaling, link state power management, and disk idle timeout. Saving the planet doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice in performance. We also utilize large disk cache, ramdisk and efficient process management to use power more effectively, actually resulting in a noticeable speed boost in comparison to non power saving counterparts.

Need proof? The server load is the combination of total cpu load and disk activity load of the server. While the average server load for our competitors are 60-80, ours are less than 1! That’s correct, by hosting your website with us, your website uses 60 times less power and at the same time, runs faster too! And we are hosting some of the most demanding forum and blog sites out there. Now multiply that number with million of websites, can you see the savings?

Q: What is DDOS-Protection?
A: Distributed Denial-of-Service is a type of attack which hundreds of computers sending massive malicious network packets attempt to bring down a server. The most popular type of these invalid network packets is the SYN_RECV packet. LayerOnline’s state-of-the-art firewall technology instantly block all types of DDOS attacks in fraction of a second, while allowing legitimate traffic to pass thru. This technology is provided by LayerOnline free of charge.

Q: What is Domain Privacy?
A: When you register a domain name, your personal information such as your real name, phone number and address are publicly available via domain whois record for everyone on the Internet to see. Websites such as domaintools.com allows anyone to check the whois record of any domain name. Revealing your personal information to the world can be very dangerous. Also spammers can get your email address from your whois record and start spamming you. Domain privacy is a security feature which hide your personal information in the whois record. LayerOnline provides free domain privacy for many top level domains such as .com, .org, .info, and .net.

Q: What is RAID-Protected Storage?
A: Hard drive failures can happen unexpectedly. When it happens, all data on the hard drive are lost. With RAID-protected storage, at least one extra hard drive is used to mirror the content of a hard drive or an array of hard drives. If one hard drive fails, all data are still intact and the server is still up and running, since the content on the failed hard drive is mirrored on another hard drive. The failed hard drive just need to be swapped out and replaced. There is no OS reload or any other recovery work involved

Q: What software are included and how do I get them?
A: The free software bundle includes Fantastico Deluxe, a collection of all the popular software from blog to forum scripts which can be easily installed.

Q: How do I upload files to my account?
A: In your FTP client, specify the following settings: Hostname: serveraddress.com (replace this with hostname of the server you are on; this information is included with your welcome mail) Username: [email protected] (replace “username” with your actual username, and “domain.com” with your domain name) Password: your password (this should be replaced with your actual password).

Some good FTP Clients are FileZilla, CuteFTP or FlashFTP.

After you logged into your FTP area, you should see a folder called “public_html” – upload files into that folder, and you should be able to view uploaded content at http://domain.com (replace “domain.com” with your actual domain name).

Q: How do I access my control panel behind firewall?
A: You should be able to login into your control panel by typing “http://cpanel.serveraddress.com/” (replace with real server name) or “http://serveraddress.com/cpanel” in your browser. Use your actual username and password to login. Please note that you must use our nameservers to use this feature.

Q: What email settings should I use for my pop3/smtp mail accounts?
A: In your mail client settings, use the following values to access your pop3/smtp account:
SMTP Mail Server: the server name of your account (included in welcome mail)
POP3 Mail server: the server name of your account (included in welcome mail)
POP3 Mail Account (Username): [email protected] (your “username” at “your domain”)
POP3 Mail Password: the password you used to create email account from control panel

Q: I have transferred my domain on your name servers – how long does it take for it to start working?
A: Usually it may take up to 24-48 hours, however with recent changes for most domains it takes about 4 hours

Q: My script does not work, how do I identify the problem?
A: Login into your control panel, go to the “Logs/Stats” section, and click on “Error log”. There you will be able to see error log for your domain.
Q: How do I login into webmail?
A: Visit “http://webmail.serveraddress.com/” (replace this with real server name you are on), and login with mail account’s credentials.

Q: I want SSH access for my account, how do I get it?
A: Sorry, for security reasons, SSH access is not permitted.

Q: I want remote MySQL access for my account, how do I get it?
A: Sorry, for security reasons, remote MySQL access is not permitted.