LayerOne rents Linux virtual servers. If you have used another cloud, most of it will feel familiar, but three things are different enough to read before you deploy anything.
Servers are metered hourly against prepaid credit
You do not get a monthly bill for a server. You put credit on the account, and every server on the account draws that balance down every hour it exists. The monthly figure on the pricing page is a 730 hour equivalent, published so you can compare plans against other hosts.
That means a server you are not using still costs money. Stopping it does not help, because the CPU, RAM and disk stay reserved for you. Destroying it is what stops the charge. See How hourly billing works.
One region, owned hardware
Everything deploys in Tampa, Florida, on KVM, on Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs with Enterprise SAS SSD storage. There is no region picker because there is currently one region.
Root access, and the consequences of it
Every server hands you the root account. Nothing is managed for you unless you buy Managed Services. Nothing is backed up for you at all, which is the single most common surprise:
There are no automated backups yet
The platform does not take backups of your server, and the pricing page's Automated Backups line is a planned add-on, not a running service. If the data on a server matters, copy it somewhere else on a schedule you control. See Back up your own data.
What you get with a server
Every plan includes a dedicated IPv4 address, always-on L3 and L4 DDoS mitigation, a LayerOne cloud firewall you control, private networking, a browser console that works when SSH does not, and reverse DNS you can set yourself.
Bandwidth is a 2 TB account pool plus 500 GB for each server, shared across every server you run, not a per-server cap. Port speed is per plan: 2.5 Gbps on General Compute, 10 Gbps on Network Optimized.
What is not offered
Plan around these current product boundaries: there is no IPv6, no load balancer product, no object storage, no managed database, no block storage volumes you can attach and detach, and no snapshots or backups. You cannot add or remove a public IPv4 address after a server is deployed, and the platform does not route traffic between two private networks.
Where to go next
- Create an account
- Add credit
- Deploy your first server
- Pricing for the live plan list and rates