LeaseWeb Cloud

What do you like best?

First I must say the billing/contract cycle is impressive, while paying monthly is really a hassle for companies, leaseweb provides multiple cycle starting from 1 month, to annaul payment, even that, you can choose 36 months payment either! That way you can save alot of effor to take care of the finance issue, also they are willingly to offer a gentle discount for loyalty. Needless to say this is a gimmick to me that works most efficiently to keep their customer base.

Apart from the most itchy "Financial" stuff, networking is also a big issue to most of us. As you may know, if the latency is too high, mission-critical tasks or applications sensitive to latency will drastically decrease their performance within such situation. Fortunately leaseweb provides a great choice between "Volume" and "Premium", that way you can balance between two, and choose which suits the best need. For myself I am using the "Premium" network, and from Singapore to Hong Kong it only takes 35ms per request latency, giving me a much advantage on controlling nearline, realtime tasks on administrating infrastructure tasks. Moreover, the "Premium" route is giving the best effort on peering. How so? The "Volume" and "Premium" doesn't gives the same performance, that's because the peering pricing is cost higher if you need "Premium" routes, which gives you a better route for data transferral. While the "Volume" is your budget-friendly choice, to have high capacity flavour on transferings.

In addition to money and service, their support and self-service panel is quite out of the box -- good! Unlike most of the cloud provider, leaseweb provides an "easy-to-use" experience to users, despite the learning curve still exists for people who not knowing IT management throughly, every aspect of the control panel are minimal and simplest, giving people an understandable page to work out their duty efforts, without knowing much management knowledges.

What do you dislike?

With the best being said, there are a few place I still think leaseweb can make rooms for improvements.

Starting off is password policy. I have raised a ticket about, my password is not allowed with "dots" in it, such as "my.53cur3!p455w0rd", the following dot after "my" is not allowed. It is quite annoying if your company has password policy, which didn't comply with this one, an extra set of password would be created specially for leaseweb. That might increase the risk on managing password and sensitive information.

Second to say is the login name issue. Lots of provider including Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc, are allowing you to set customized username, or login using your email. While leaseweb disagrees, they gives you a customer number, where you will enter that into the login form as "username". Honestly I need to find my customer number in my email --literally-- every single time I login, I mean... Why all the hassle?

Third one is, lack of payment gateways. I know Paypal is quite a top-representative in the payment gateway listing, however customers always have different kinds of accounts, I think it would be great for leaseweb to add at least one more credit card recurring payment gateway, that way more customers will be attracted I suppose :D

Last but not least, the variety of system distros are "panicky" not enough. Such as only Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, FreeBSD is provided, others would need harder pathway to install. For me I use vps2arch script to convert Ubuntu to ArchLinux, despite this is a working method, still as a customer I would like the merchant provides more distro for various selection.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Fast, stable, premium service.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Peering is the most thing I treasure. As networking is most important to take care of, leaseweb did a great job out of the other providers, giving us a great opportunity to have a stable network performance.