Features and Ease of Use
Instead of offering your typical shared, cloud, or managed hosting services, Zenbox has chosen a different approach; they’ve combined a hybrid cloud design with the very best software and hardware the market has to offer. This ensures a fast and reliable service as well as flexible and secure systems.
Zenbox’s offerings are very straightforward: every plan includes unlimited storage, bandwidth, databases, domains, and email accounts. The only difference is in capping the number of unique visitors you’re allowed each month. Each plan is named after the unique visitor count limit: for Zenbox 5k, it’s 5,000 unique visitors a month; Zenbox 25k allows 25,000 unique visitors a month; Zenbox 50k allows 50,000 unique visitors a month; Zenbox 100k allows 100,000 unique visitors a month. If you get more than 100,000 unique visitors every month, you can contact them for a customized hosting plan.
But not to worry: Zenbox doesn’t penalize you just because your website gets more popular than expected. So if you do happen to purchase, for example, the Zenbox 5k plan, and then get 6,000 visitors that month, you won’t wake up one day and suddenly find your hosting account suspended. (If this happens on a regular basis, however, you may have a Zenbox representative contact you to ask if you’d like to upgrade your plan.)
Zenbox has invested quite a bit into their hosting infrastructure to provide their users with the fastest hardware and software in the Polish market. In lieu of the typical MySQL databases, they’ve opted for MySQL PerconaDB, which runs up to three times faster than usual. Their LiteSpeed Enterprise server also runs up to six times faster than Apache web servers. Furthermore, all your website data will be hosted on pure SSDs and run on instances of 32GB RAM and 16 vCPU. They also guarantee 99.99% uptime – a notch higher than the industry average of 99.9%.
One of the unique features of Zenbox is they don’t just create backups of your data on a daily or weekly basis – they do so every six hours. Each copy is kept for up to seven days, so you can rest assured that no matter what mishaps might occur, you’ll only lose six hours’ worth of work at most.
Pricing and Support
Zenbox’s pricing schemes are as straightforward as their hosting plans. You pay a flat monthly fee with two months free if you opt for an annual contract term. They don’t have misleading promotional prices that are then jacked up after the initial term: their packages, as well as their prices, are utterly transparent. Also, given that they offer unlimited pretty-much-everything with their hosting plans, I’d say their prices are well within – if not below – the market average.
They don’t have a free plan available, but they do have a 14-day free trial that includes a website migration service and basic support for account management. Plus, if you’re moving over from another hosting company and you’ve purchased a contract from Zenbox, they’ll gladly extend the validity of your Zenbox contract for however many months you had left with your previous hosting company. This can get you up to nine free months of hosting – a pretty generous offer.
Switching between hosting plans is pretty straightforward, but you still need to get in touch with their customer support. However, since their hosting plans are solely determined by the number of unique visitors you receive, they actively monitor account usage and will reach out to you if an upgrade to a different plan is necessary.
Their customer support is available 24/7 via email and the contact form on their website. It was a little disappointing that they didn’t even have a support ticket system in place, but I was glad to see that they’re very responsive to customer emails despite their somewhat primitive channels. They’ve also got a decent knowledge base, though this is entirely in Polish.
