Zen Web Hosting

As a web designer / web master I use a lot of different hosting companies.

I all my ten years of service I have never come across a worse web host than Zen Internet from Rochdale, UK.

First they have tried to claim they had no name servers - or that rather for me to point my domain to them I would have to pay an extra £15 a year and transfer my domain registration to them. I even had the misfortune to speak to tech support operatives so stupid and badly trained that they actually believed the idiocy they were peddling - who tried to make me feel stupid for thinking I could point a domain to a name server without paying an extra £15 a year for domain management services. "There are free DNS services if you don't want to use ours" they chirped. That's right I will use american name servers for my UK hosting, that will really help me to get listed in Google.co.uk

I eventually figured out through trial and error that if I pointed my domain to the server IP address, it resolved just fine.

Onto the next hurdle, I try and install a php script that uses IonCube loaders (a way PHP developers can stop anyone from stealing their work) - only for it not to work. Out of all the linux hosting companies I have used, again they are the first not to use this as standard.

Oh dear.

Here is part of one of the emails I got fromt their tech support for your amusement:

The aforementioned £15/year charge is for the use of our nameservers, if your domain is not hosted with us. We do not have any qualms about you using third party domain registration and nameservers, and many of our customers use such a service and simply update their A and MX records accordingly. However, as it seems that your registrar does not provide you with DNS services the only way to add A and MX records is to update your package with them, or pay for the use of our nameservers to provide DNS for a third-party registered domain.

Again, this is a completely optional service and was presented to you as a solution to the problems you had with your registrar.

The registrar that I am "having problems with" is Network Solutions - one of the worlds biggest and most respected registrars. They allow me to point my domain to a name server, A record... wherever I like. Zen Internet, it is you who have the problem. Idiots.