Zoner started out as an ISP in 2005 but soon made the switch to hosting. The company is based in Vantaa, Finland and offers its services in both Finnish and English. Here, you’ll find shared web hosting and WordPress hosting as well as VPS hosting products with data centers located in Finland, Germany, Netherlands, the U.K., the U.S., and Singapore.
Features and Ease of Use
Zoner’s hosting packages include some pretty impressive features on top of all the hosting essentials:
- Free domain registration
- Free SSL certificates
- Multisite hosting
- Daily automatic backups
- Storage from 1 GB to 80 Gb (for shared or WordPress hosting)
- Up to 500 GB of monthly bandwidth (for shared hosting)
Zoner.fi has packages that will suit a wide range of user needs. While 1 GB of storage is only suitable for the most basic websites, you can get up to 80 GB, not counting the customizable Enterprise plan. The same goes for the available bandwidth. You’ll also be taken care of with a domain and SSL certificate.
WordPress customers can have their existing websites transferred for free. Alternatively, you can have a fresh copy of the CMS preinstalled for you.
Shared hosting accounts are managed using DirectAdmin, one of the best hosting panels out there. You’ll also get several other great features like DNS management, Horde or Roundcube webmail, and the website builder Moogo.
Zoner doesn’t provide any control panel yet for WordPress hosting, but you can manage your site using secure channels like SSH or WP-CLI. This is one problem I found with the Zoner platform, since it means that you need to have a certain level of technical proficiency to get the most out of the WordPress plans here. The upside is that these WordPress plans are cloud-based and come with automatic updates (including your plugins and themes).
Pricing and Support
Zoner.fi’s web hosting plans fall within the spectrum of mid-range pricing. They’re definitely not the cheapest prices out there, but they’re still quite reasonable for a European host. Zoner’s WordPress and VPS hosting plans start at a higher price point somewhere within the mid to high-range, but you also get a lot more value here since they come with great performance.
In terms of storage and bandwidth, the former is a bit low while the latter is within a respectable range considering the price. However, it’s worth keeping in mind that you get a free domain, free SSL certificate, and other value-added features, like a CDN for WordPress hosting.
Web hosting plans are only available on annual billing terms, but the first term usually comes with a significant discount. In contrast, WordPress hosting offers monthly, quarterly, and yearly billing options. WordPress customers also enjoy the benefit of free website transfers from other hosting providers.
All Zoner.fi plans are also backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with your hosting.
You can reach the customer support team via email, phone, or live chat. However, Zoner’s phone lines are only available between 08:00 and 18:00 Finland time. They claim to answer calls within an average of 23 seconds, which is very impressive. Bear in mind that there aren’t any toll-free numbers, however, so you’ll have to pay for the international call charges. Alternatively, Zoner’s support staff also respond very quickly to live chat queries and are usually very polite and helpful:
Zoner also has a relatively comprehensive knowledge base that covers many topics quite thoroughly.
