MediaLayer Review
| Shared Plan Grid | |||
| AppLayer DX | AppLayer LX | AppLayer EX | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup Fee | $0 | ||
| Fee/Mo | $9.95 | $19.95 | $39.95 |
| Disk Space | 500MB | 1000MB | 2500MB |
| Transfer/Mo | 10GB | 20GB | 50GB |
| Domains | 3 | 6 | 12 |
Other Account Features
- DirectAdmin control panel.
- 1 unique IP available per account (free).
- SSH / Shell Access
- PayPal payment.
- Month to Month payment plans.
- Tier 1 bandwidth. (Mzima / Internap).
- Webalizer statistics.
Subjective Review
- Pre-Sales Question. Pre-sales questions were answered in less than 1 hour and provided exemplary answers.
- Account Sign Up. Typical sign up procedure. No difficulties. PayPal payment.
- Control Panel. MediaLayer uses DirectAdmin which is not as common as cPanel. The interface is simple and straight forward. If you are familar with cPanel or any other control panel you will probably will not have difficulty with DirectAdmin. Compared to cPanel, DirectAdmin is well organized with common tasks grouped under headings rather than cPanel’s overwhelming collection of icons. The control panel loads a little slow at times.
- CMS Install. MediaLayer does not offer any automated script install option, so Wordpress was uploaded via FTP and manually configured. No problems were encountered.
- Site Creation. The administrative panel for Wordpress runs extremely fast. Pages load fast enough that skipping around the interface is enjoyable compared to doing similar tasks on other hosts.
- Technical Support Contact. Several requests for technical support were made. Responses were always returned in less than an hour and some in a few minutes. The quality of the responses were exemplary
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Subjective Summary. At this early point in the review process MediaLayer has been one of the best shared hosting providers reviewed. Technical support and server speed are at the top of their class.
MediaLayer is taking a different approach to shared hosting by providing a high quality server environment, network and technical support. This quality comes at the expense of rather modest disk space and monthly transfer. A site that utilizes a CMS or other dynamic database driven site will probably significantly benefit from the increased performance compared to other shard hosting providers. Attention must be paid to the limits of the account if hosting large or a large quantity of media files. 
