Hostzealot Review: Will YOU Become A Zealot?

In this review we will talk about Hostzealot.

But first, listen to this:

Like in our last review, we talked about a hosting service that caters to a more robust crowd that likes having the most freedom and the least interference.

Well, on popular demand, we’ve come across yet another great hosting service that has Dedicated & VPS hosting options at super-affordable rates and features: Hostzealot.

Hostzealot was born in 2009 and has since established a stable infrastructure to offer the best to its European audiences & beyond.

On the surface, they have all the safe trappings of a competent service like 99.9% uptime, cheap prices, scalability, easy configuration, and no messy contracts so you can get going right away.

But in addition to that, they also offer Shared hosting services as well which seems a bit odd because these niche services don’t tend to have a great track record with many specializations.

There’s also the question of customer support, do they even have any?

Rest assured, because we’re here to answer these questions for you.

So, without losing any more time, let’s dive in.

Pricing & Features

Now, with these kinds of hosting, pricing is kept somewhat scattered so they aren’t well-defined tiers for you to browse through. You just scroll through the ones that fit your budget and needs.

We are looking at Dedicated Servers here and on the left panel, you can filter through the options that fit what you’re looking for.

From the top, you have 3 plans with the Atom C2750, which is an 8-Core processor with a max turbo frequency of 2.6 GHz and a 4MB cache value.

So with the 8 cores, you get DDR3 4 GB RAM and 250 GB SATA at €39/month (or $45/month if you’re curious). The location is set to London which is a great eCommerce hub.

Now to compare that to something like our flagship hosting, Bluehost, would be an overkill in almost every aspect. Bluehost is about 25% more expensive with a much slower processor and you get mirrored storage which often isn’t the best solution.

Moving on to more power, Hostzealot has the Xeon E3-1220 which has 4-Cores but 8 threads (which means better for multitasking), 16 GB DDR3 RAM, 1000 GB SATA storage which of course is further upgradable.

Since they are on sale, you can get a Chicago server with 32 GB RAM at €67/month. You can get a LOT done with these specs like a big e-store, a traffic-heavy blog, etc.

Also, for security, you get SSL certificates by default which means fewer chances of phishing attacks or data theft.

Let’s get to the heavy hitters now. The Xeon E5-2690 servers come with 12-Cores (which comes in sets of 2 so in total i.e. 24 cores) and that is pretty much Intel’s processor limits, considering their latest consumer processor has 10 cores.

Anyways, you can now get up to 128 GB DDR4 RAM with up to 2×8000 GB SATA storage. But with everything turned to max, you get hit with a hefty price too which is €423/month.

Earlier we also mentioned Shared hosting. They start as low as €0.85/month and go as high as €9.27/month which is cheap as hell.

Not to forget, with features like cPanel, not unmetered but plenty of bandwidth, enough disk space for anything from a blog to an app-site project, and even unlimited websites with the highest plan so you can do any number of test-websites as you like.

Regardless, those are some of the most feature-heavy plans coming from a small/niche company with limited resources.

Ease Of Use

Unlike a lot of other smaller hosting companies, Hostzealot has a custom checkout solution that has a lot many customization options that we are about to talk about.

In the first 2 sections above, you can see the plan features that we selected which also mentions the server that our website will be on. After that, you can select your billing cycle.

After that, you can edit further options like traffic usage, additional IPv4 space, storage, bandwidth type, OS, OS type, control panel (which costs extra), and even software RAID.

Further down, you get the option to select your backup option and management style. You can get up to 1 GB free backup space but anything more will cost you.

The same goes for management. You do it yourself or you can pay more to get more features.

After selecting what’s necessary, you can take a look at the total cost in the small section on the right side and move on to ‘Checkout’.

The next step is pretty much it. You enter your basic details, choose the payment method (which are plenty from PayPal to bitcoin), a few personal details, you can use a promo code here as well, and complete the order without much hassle.

That was just a 2-step order & registration process. You pretty much select what you want in the first and click on ‘buy’ in the next. However, the addons could way down the cost and make it expensive.

HostZealot Customer Support

Customer support has somewhat become a cherry on top for hosting services. Some seem to nail it very easily because of more resources and finance but some aren’t that fortunate.

So what kind of customer support does Hostzealot have?

Well, they have a ticketing system, live chat support, call back system for phone support, and oddly enough, Skype support.

This was quite interesting to find out because there aren’t many services that use Skype as a mode of service so we selected it for testing.

Clicking on the icon instantly launched Skype. If you don’t have it, it will maybe redirect you to the site but it is hard to tell.

So, you get connected to their support team instantly. Since this is Skype, you can already use all their additional tools to address your issue briefly.

The reply was indeed very instant and we posted a query about their shared hosting plans. Above you can see their active times for service & support.

So it might’ve taken roughly 10 minutes to hear back from them but we did nonetheless which is good. No doubt, being a small operation they must be busy.

But the bigger issue is that in more delicate or emergency situations this much lag could cause significant discomfort and delayed resolution to the user.

Moving on, Hostzealot also has a Knowledge Base section where you can learn the ins & outs of certain servers or get your general questions resolved. It’s not that huge but it is certainly useful.

These are just simple questions/answers. Nothing too fancy. But again, simplicity is what a lot of people come looking for. It seems like more of an FAQ section than a full-fledged knowledge resource but if you want more resources, they also have a blog.

To sum up, Skype customer support is fine for what it is. Slow but definitely functional. The FAQ section is perfect for nit-pick issues and simple queries.

HostZealot: Conclusion

We’re at the same spot again as before. The service lacks some auxiliary knick-knacks and features but offers freedom and robustness in exchange.

Should you still go ahead with the decision of buying? Or let it pass in the hopes of something better?

And the answer again will be two-parter:

If you like having the DIY-feel in your service, having maximum control over your server, separately configuring add-ons, and the US/Europe location availability, then you can’t go wrong with Hostzealot.

Especially the pricing which is top-tier in line with features.

On the other hand, if you like the comfort of a bigger service with much more support backing it and a lot more automation in your experience then something mainstream would be better.

The main trade-off is certainly between control and comfort.

So tell us what do you like more: Comfort or Control? Which one would enhance your experience more? Can Hostzealot be your choice of hosting?

Whatever your thoughts may be, please let us know in the comments below.