Zenon N.S.P. (tagline “Quality mark of the internet!”) is a longstanding Russian hosting provider that has been in business since 2005 and which has more than 20,000 customers. Their website is in Russian.
Features and Ease of Use
Zenon N.S.P. provides a comprehensive range of hosting services, including shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated servers, SSL certificates, and domain registration. As standard, their shared hosting plans come with the following core features:
- 30 backups per month
- One .ru or .po domain for free
- Up to 40 add-on domains
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
- 10GB to 40GB SSD disk space
- Unlimited traffic
For beginners, the hosting is compatible with most popular CMS programs such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, and you can purchase a website building tool with more than 190 ready-made mobile-responsive website templates. Interestingly, no one-click installer is advertised.
For experts, there are lots of value-added features including PHP (version 5 and the far faster version 7), Python, Django, and Ruby. You also get SSH access and Cron jobs.
Depending on the hosting plan, resources range from 10 sites to 40 sites, 10GB SSD to 40GB SSD storage, and 10 MySQL databases to 40 MySQL databases. All plans come with unlimited subdomains, a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, and 30 backups per month.
Servers are load-balanced to mitigate the risks of traffic spikes, and they use SSDs for greater reliability and read/write speeds up to ten times faster than traditional hard disk drives. Whilst the shared hosting plans are comprehensive, with many decent features (mainly geared towards experts), you also have the option of scaling up to Zenon’s virtual private servers or virtual dedicated servers.
Pricing and Support
Zenon N.S.P.’s prices are on the high side, but the plans come with a lot of advanced features for experts. They also include a lot of unlimited resources such as subdomains, mailboxes, and traffic, plus multiple databases and domains. And all plans offer a free .ru or .po domain if required. There are a few add-ons that can increase the final checkout cost, such as SSL certificates, additional mailboxes, and extra storage space.
Plans can be bought only on one-year terms, which is quite restrictive, and the signup process is quite intimidating. You are presented with an extensive legal contract, and you have to add your Russian passport number to the checkout form. International customers without a Russian passport have to email the company instead.
To access 24/7 technical support, you can reach out to the company via email or phone. Regrettably, my two email attempts received a generic response indicating that they will “consider it in the near future,” without any further follow-up. In this case, the presence of a knowledge base can be helpful for self-support.
