What is Lightserve?

Lightserve offers a virtual data room platform that allows you to manage your confidential documents online. It’s a secure and more professional alternative to email, FTP, or generic filesharing sites – it allows you to control your documents after you hit ‘send’. Using Lightserve, you can prevent people from downloading, printing, or saving your documents, and you can see how long they spend reading them. You can also create sites that handle unusually large volumes of data, without restrictions. Virtual data rooms have been around for a while, but Lightserve’s unique feature set, unlimited use plans, and unbeatable price point are opening the industry to a wide variety of markets, from real estate to high finance.

Why use Lightserve?

We offer the best combination of price and features in the industry. Our software offers advanced security controls and workflow features to manage multiple transactions side-by-side. Lightserve delivers confidential documents in a more secure, and far faster, manner than legacy technologies and physical data rooms. If you’re looking to host a serious data room online and care about cost, we think you’d be crazy to go with any other provider.

Who uses Lightserve?

Lightserve is trusted by over five hundred professional services firms, most of which are in the financial or legal space. As of January 2014 we have managed deals and engagements from New York to Dubai to Shanghai, and our network has grown to host hundreds of thousands of confidential documents. Our customers include M&A advisory firms, private equity firms, law firms, and we have expanded our offering into markets as diverse as architects, real estate agents, startups, business brokers, broker dealers, and more.

What is a virtual data room (VDR)?

A virtual data room is an online workspace that has advanced security controls compared to an ordinary FTP site or filesharing service. Originally used by investment bankers to protect high-value transactions, they are now implemented by a wide variety of corporations because they offer higher data fidelity, more thorough logging, and advanced permission controls for any sensitive file or record. However, traditionally data rooms have been prohibitively expensive for anyone unwilling to pass the cost on to their clients, which is what Lightserve has changed.

What does it cost? Is it really unlimited use?

See our pricing page for current plans. Our philosophy is that you should not pay a great deal for things that don't cost us anything (like creating folders or inviting users). You get up to 500gb of storage and unlimited documents, and features like data room branding, customization, document history, and folder upload. We also have an enterprise plan available that can embed on your domain and has more elaborate customizations and tools for extremely large datasets.

What about uptime?

Uptime has remained steady at over 99.9% since our launch in July 2008. Statistics provided by Pingdom.

Why is Lightserve so much cheaper than other VDR providers?

The real answer is that we use cloud computing whereas our competitors serve expensive, front-loaded document software that was designed decades ago and comes with high licensing fees that they pass on to you. Also, many of our competitors' sales models are focused on wining and dining large 'high touch' accounts, whereas we think people will turn to our product if we build better software. And we just don’t believe data rooms should cost that much in 2015.

How do you protect my documents?

For maximum security, Lightserve encrypts uploaded documents onto the Google Cloud Platform, which commands the same level of protection as Google's web infrastructure. On GCP, the data is distributed geographically and protected by a stateful firewall, physical barriers, and signed API calls. Documents are sent via a SSL-enhanced online document format.

Can recipients print documents?

You have granular control over who can print your documents, folders, and files. Because anyone who can print can also 'print to pdf', we generally treat printing the same as downloading.

Can recipients save documents?

You can control who can save or download your documents. Once someone downloads a document, however, it is essentially in their control.

Watermarks?

Dynamically generated on all documents. You choose whether to imprint them on downloaded documents.

List ordering?

A fast drag-and-drop interface that makes complex list ordering a breeze. Smart numerals and ordinals that update seamlessly when the list structure changes, hiding gaps from people who cannot see certain items.

How much storage do I get?

From 10gb to 500gb, depending on your plan. For larger sizes, contact us.

Are there limits on file size or upload rate?

There is no file upload rate limit. We support uploading files up to 2gb in size. Gigantic files sometimes need to be broken into segments for online viewing.

Where is Lightserve located?

Our offices are here. Our technology team is headquartered in the San Francsico Bay Area, and our business team is located in New York. Data is stored in geographically redundant locations throughout the country, which prevents downtime and makes our backups more secure.