zen.co.uk Bronze, £ 4.49/mo. on Linux Shared

Bronze has been updated on April 15, 2020 (added February 2, 2018)

🔌 Hosted domains :	1
🆓 free domains :	0
📌 Dedicated IPs :	0
💳 Payment Methods :	Credit / Debit / Prepaid CardsWire TransferCheck Payments
🔨 Control Panel :	CPanel
✍️ Support Options :	EmailHelp DeskPhone / Toll-FreeAvailable 24/7
🌏 Server Locations :	United Kingdom
⚑ Targeting :	UK

See also initial Bronze plan location on their website!

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📜 Plan description

📄 Editorial Review

Zen Internet is one of the United Kingdom’s longest-established independent internet and technology companies. Founded in 1995 in Rochdale by brothers Richard and Daniel Tang, Zen began with a small Linux-based infrastructure and dial-up capacity for only six simultaneous users. Richard Tang remains the company’s Founder and CEO, and Zen continues to operate independently rather than as part of a large telecommunications group.

Zen Internet Limited was incorporated on September 13, 1995. The company has since grown to more than 600 employees and expanded from dial-up internet access into consumer broadband, business connectivity, hosting, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, voice services, networking and wholesale telecommunications.

The service portfolio now extends well beyond traditional website hosting. Zen provides domain registration, Linux shared hosting, reseller hosting, WordPress-compatible hosting, business email, website-building tools, SSL certificates, UK cloud infrastructure, colocation, off-site backup and managed AWS services.

Conventional unmanaged VPS and dedicated-server packages are no longer a prominent part of the standard ordering process. Businesses requiring private virtual machines, application servers or dedicated infrastructure are instead directed toward Zen Cloud, colocation or managed cloud solutions.

Shared hosting uses cPanel and UK-based servers. Bronze, Silver and Gold packages are available to individual and business customers, while the Reseller plan is intended for agencies, developers and IT companies managing multiple websites.

The Bronze package supports one website and includes 50 GB of storage, 100 GB of monthly bandwidth, three databases, ten FTP accounts and ten mailboxes. Silver increases the allocation to 100 GB of storage, 250 GB of bandwidth, five websites, fifteen databases and twenty-five mailboxes. Gold supports ten websites, 150 GB of storage, 500 GB of bandwidth, twenty-five databases and fifty mailboxes.

The Reseller package provides 250 GB of storage, 1,000 GB of monthly bandwidth, unlimited websites, 100 databases, 300 FTP accounts and 250 mailboxes. This is a useful configuration for agencies and developers, although the fixed bandwidth and mailbox allowances should be considered when comparing it with reseller services built around nominally unlimited resources.

WordPress, OpenCart, Joomla, Drupal, phpBB and other applications can be installed through the hosting environment. A website builder is included for customers who do not want to work directly with HTML or a content-management system. FTP access, webmail, email forwarding, aliases, autoresponders, database management and DNS controls are also included.

Free Let’s Encrypt certificates are supported through cPanel AutoSSL. Once a domain points correctly to the Zen hosting server, the certificate can normally be issued automatically. Certificates can also be requested manually from the SSL/TLS section of cPanel. Commercial SSL certificates are available separately for business customers.

Hosting email accounts include webmail, calendars, task management, aliases, forwarding and autoresponders. Incoming messages are filtered for spam and malware, while files uploaded to the hosting platform are scanned for malicious content.

Zen Cloud is a UK-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform for virtual machines, storage and networking. Customers manage their operating systems, applications and data through a dedicated portal, while Zen maintains the underlying cloud infrastructure.

The platform supports application hosting, development environments, business-continuity systems, infrastructure modernization and migration away from aging physical servers. Resources can be scaled when required, and predefined virtual-machine configurations simplify deployment for organizations that do not need the complexity of a hyperscale cloud platform.

Zen Cloud is available as a self-managed service or with assistance from Zen’s cloud architects and technical teams. Workloads are distributed across geographically separate UK locations and covered by a 99.99% availability SLA.

Zen also provides migration, optimization, security and managed services for Amazon Web Services. The company has worked within the AWS ecosystem since 2013, maintains more than fifty AWS accreditations and has supported over 130 organizations.

Its CloudSure managed-service framework covers infrastructure monitoring, cost control, security alerts, operating-system patching, backups, disaster recovery, technical changes and access to DevOps or platform-engineering expertise. This is aimed primarily at organizations that use AWS but do not want to maintain a full internal cloud operations team.

Backup as a Service stores off-site copies within Zen’s UK cloud infrastructure. Backup jobs, retention policies and restores are managed through a web console. The service includes 30-day immutable storage, end-to-end encryption and two UK storage repositories.

Air-gapped configurations and soft-delete protection add resilience against ransomware and accidental deletion. Billing is monthly, and restores do not carry separate recovery charges.

Zen also operates a colocation facility in Rochdale. Customers can rent individual rack units, full racks or dedicated suites, with power allocations reaching 50 amps per rack and connectivity options of up to 10 Gbps.

Secure access is available around the clock. Remote-hands assistance can be used for physical server tasks when the customer’s own engineers cannot attend the facility.

The website is modern, responsive and divided clearly between residential, business, enterprise and partner services. The interface is available in English, and no multi-language version exists. Consumer and business prices are displayed in British pounds, with VAT treatment depending on the intended customer type.

The standard hosting platform remains suitable for ordinary websites, email and popular content-management systems, but some technical specifications retain references to MySQL 5 and older application installers. Customers deploying newer frameworks or applications with strict database-version requirements should confirm the exact server environment before ordering.