Zyma Web Hosting Review

One of our New Year resolutions is to deliver valuable information on web hosting. What better way to do this than reviewing new and lesser-known web hosting providers. You never know what gems you may find… or not.

Today, I would like to review a relatively new player in the hosting industry i.e. Zyma Technologies. Why them? Because they seem to have generated quite an intense debate among both reviewers and customers over the Internet for such a new host and I am all curious.

Price: £2.49/month £1.79/month
Size: Unlimited Space, Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Email Accounts
Special: Free domain name
Offer: Visit Zyma’s website

Zyma’s Background

First, let’s get acquainted with this new kid. Zyma Technologies (Zyma) was launched in 2010. It is a UK based web hosting company with servers located also in the UK.

At a glance, Zyma has all the features a top host would offer. From unlimited space and bandwidth to 99.9% uptime guarantee to free website transfer service, they do sound like a great host. On top of that, they have been awarded a number of awards too!

Here, I admit that I have not tried their services so I can’t speak from any first-hand experience. But I had been doing researches about them and have list down some of the good and not-so-good things about them below.

Now, I know some of you will start reminding me that it was I who had advised many times before that information on the web should be taken with a handful of salt. And that’s why I went through lots of discussions about them before forming the following opinions. In the future, I may consider hosting one of my websites at Zyma to evaluate for myself how good or bad their hosting is.

The Good

With the intense competition among hosting providers, I was pretty amazed at what they are offering especially for such a new setup. Some of the good stuff about them are:

1. Cost

   Their shared hosting plan is actually pretty cheap. It costs £2.49 £1.79 per month only. That’s about $2.87 per month (based on web conversion at time of writing).

   But you would have to sign up for 12, 24 or 36 months. There is currently no monthly payment option. But I don’t think this should not be too much of a concern as the cost is pretty low. It will also save you bank charges to pay in advance.

   At the same time, they are also offering a 30 day money back guarantee so you do have a whole month to judge their service without burning your investment.

2. Features

   Zyma provides most of the services that you would need to build an individual blog or a small business website. Besides what was mentioned earlier, you will get free shopping cart, shared SSL certificate, unlimited email and FTP accounts as well as free £30 Google Adwords and $75 Yahoo marketing vouchers.

   Zyma has also tied with Softaculous to provide easy installation of over 275 scripts that includes blogs (e.g. WordPress), content management system (e.g, Joomla), mails (e.g. SquirrelMail), forums (e.g. phpBB) and e-commerce (e.g. Magento). Softaculous is very similar to Fantastico and SimpleScripts offered by other web hosts.

   They do offer extra features at additional cost and it is quite normal among hosting providers to do so e.g. Private SSL and Private Whois for domain name. Should you find yourself unwilling to pay £19.95 per year for monthly backups, there are plenty of alternative backup software that you can obtain.

3. Technical Support

   Zyma’s technical support includes live chat, email support (which is 24/7) and phone calls. So far, technical support seemed to be quite efficient and even through emails, subscribers didn’t have to wait too long. They certainly have improved their support system compared to when they initially started.

   As for other means of hosting support, Zyma does offer a library of video tutorials and guides and knowledgebase.

The Problems

While Zyma clearly has some loyal fans, there’s no denying that they still have some way to go before making it as the “recommended web hosting company” and get to my top 10 web hosting list. Some of their challenges that I noticed include the following:

1. Outages

   They had several major outages back in 2011 and also early 2012. Subsequent to the October 2011 downtime that was due to a “software fault in one of their servers”, their customers were compensated with 2 months of free hosting.

   The compensation was the right thing to do. However, if given the choice, I would prefer an almost perfect uptime rather than having downtime every now and then though I’m being compensated for it. But I guess they were starting out then and I do understand that they had upgraded servers a couple of times.

2. Unannounced Suspension

   Though Zyma does offer unlimited space and bandwidth, they don’t tell you how much is unlimited. But then again, this is a norm in the hosting industry. Web hosts generally assured users that they will have adequate resources to run a normal website.

   Anyway, what I really wanted to highlight was the fact that they don’t warn you when your account goes beyond normal usage. Nor do they give you a grace period so that you can sort the situation out. There were a number of complaints about them shutting down websites without prior notice and the users were left in a fix. Granted the users may be using too much resource, but I feel that they should get a warning before websites get shut down.

My conclusion on Zyma

So, what’s my conclusion? Well, overall, they do sound like a good company to host with. Though the many complaints about how they shut down a website because of “overloading” do concern me.

I may want to get an account with them for a personal review. But this will depend on what you, my readers want. So, do let me know if you wish to know more about Zyma Technologies’ hosting.

Click here to visit Zyma