I think it is safe to say that Zyma.com is proof that review sites like hostingsthatsuck.com are not to be trusted. A year has gone by allowing for real feedback to come in. Not like the arranged positive feedback that was given out in exchange for free hosting.  Not to mention nothing to stop these sites form signing up for “our affiliate program is one of the most attractive schemes around.” which paid out 40%. Granted I would not have used the word scheme. I can’t say I fault Zyma.com for contacting people for reviews to promote their company.

How my review of Zyma.com began

Last year Khuram the owner/marketing director and from what other people tell me the support for zyma.com contacted me to offer me free hosting account in exchange for a review. Not the first host to ask for a review. But like all of them, the owner of Zyma.com did not bother to actually look at this site and see if it’s actually a review site. I told him there was no way I would trust any of my sites on a $10 a year account. Shortly after I find that not only did he contact me he contacted a review site that uses “(hosts name) + sucks” as a marketing strategy in search engines like Google.  That site was hostingsthatsuck.com. The whole premise was this must be a good host because there were no negative reviews about this site. Never mind that before Zyma.com was a U.K. webhosting site, it belonged to some construction company in Spain. The review was disingenuous.

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1618

Khuram of Zyma.com was not happy with me

My review of Hostingsthatsucks.com review had Khuram the owner/marketing director/support and probable sales agent for Zyma.com contact me sharply protesting my review for calling his site a scam. This had to be a record in response time as he contacted me the same day I had posted this blog article. He asked that I remove my review of Zyma.com. I declined removing the post as I will only do that if I am wrong. I also made clear I only quoted one of the other people that he asked to do a review, which was hostingsthatsuck.com.  Hostingsthatsuck.com used words like scam and sucks, everything that someone would not want to hear about their site.  A site that has appeared on my site before and will continue to appear as long as hostingsthatsuck.com continues to use a false negative context while obscuring other negative search engine reviews.

After Khuram finale really read what I had wrote he conceded and claimed to have contacted hostingsthatsuck.com to remove their post, and that he removed their free hosting account and affiliate link:

“which is why we have revoked hostingsthatsuck.com affiliate license with us, as well as removed their website from our servers.”

“With regards to hostingsthatsuck.com, we have requested them to remove the post, however we cannot force anyone to do anything, and so we are limited as to what more we can do.”

Honestly I don’t believe him as the so called review for zyma.com at hostingsthatsuck.com has remained unchanged as you can see from the attached screen shot. I do not believe that the owners of this fake review site would leave a post-up for a site that will not pay them.

But the true gem out of all of this was the discussion on unlimited hosting. I could not get an answer on what normal usage was. It’s the same spill I get from any unlimited hosting advocate.  But in order to know what normal is you have to have number that’s your base line.  At less than $10 a year Zyma.com’s normal is going to be lower than what hostgator.com considers normal usage.

Why the Interest in Zyma.com again?

There are a few factors in why.  Last year I had promised to do a re-review of Zyma.com. I was going to do a re-review.  But with of the big hosts doing FTC compliance the need for a template review became unnecessary. It seemed better to just go after any review site that show cased a host with an FTC compliance requirements in their terms of service. After all my issue is not that affiliates are making money, it is that some affiliates try to label themselves as review sites and do not mention they are biased for the sake of a payment.

Another reason I bring up Zyma.com again is because of this unreal unlimited hosting plan. Not that I think any unlimited plan should be trusted for real hosting needs. Zyma.com offered this so called unlimited hosting plan for less than $10 a year.  I call it unreal because it’s not something done by other providers such as Hostgator.com and Endurance International Group. There are a lot of good reasons behind that. First and foremost it takes money to make money. One thing I am certain of is that Zyma.com does not have the capital and buying power that any of the popular so called unlimited companies have. In short Hostgator.com has the power to buy machines that can handle hundreds of people for far less then Zyma.com would.

Too often I encounter people that think that hosting should make up less than 1% of what they bring in. These are the same people that fall for any cheap solution. To anyone that thinks hosting should always be cheap, it is time to wake up from fairy land. When you buy hosting your data is not stored in another dimension where there is infinite capacity, its stored on a hard drive on a server, which in turn is stored on a rack that is hooked into a router.  This server’s rack is housed in data center that receives utilities such as water, electricity, and perhaps natural gas. Not to mention phone lines, the connection to an upstream provider. Plus if the provider offers backup options such as a gas powered generator and battery backups there are even more expenses.  Plus there are no gnomes working for free in the back ground. A human being in needed to do the maintenance and support for zyma.com, and most preferable more than 1 human being. If these human being are not outsourced from another country like say the Philippines or India and is in Great Britain then the costs go up even further.

Don’t forget that they offer 40% payment to people in their affiliate scheme (once again their choice of words not mine). Though I doubt at less than $4 per sale most review sites would be interested. That and merchants are not exactly allowing you to collect money for free. Which at the time Zyma.com’s only merchant was PayPal.com, that alone could cause less people to sign up as there are a lot of people that are not fans of PayPal.com who has decided to have a 30% retainer on proven participants. Then there are other fees such as business licenses. Running a business is not as simple as snapping your fingers.

The quality of the equipment and human interaction elements to a degree depend on how much is paid for them.  In short don’t expect a Porsche 918 Spyder on a budget that could buy you a 1985 Chevrolet Chevettee.  But while we are on the subject of human interaction back in January 2011 they were only offering 14 – 16 hours of support. This is my own opinion that Khuram was the only person at Zyma.com.

By October 2011 Zyma.com appeared to be falling apart at the seams

While I got a few comments on the down time at Zyma.com, most of the customers that contacted me via email. Per my own policy I do not publish the emails of customers unless they give me permission; sadly none of them contacted me back.  Down time seemed to be as long as 10 days. Review sites like hostingsthatsuck.com had people complaining about down time as well in October.

I contacted Khuram to get his side in regards to people complaining about down time, but I was never contacted back.

So what about the people that promoted Zyma.com?

I have looked at lot of sites that did a so called review based off of the free hosting plan from Zyma.com. One in particular did not have their hosting account continued this year by Zyma.com:

http://www.pingable.org/zyma-com-cheap-webhost-review/

Out of all of the sites that I have found with in the first 2 pages of search engine results on Google, this is the only one I find that retracts their positive feedback.

At the top of the page has been added a notice of:

“We have received a lot of comments saying how bad Zyma have been, constant down time, and poor service. Zyma were meant to provide us with a free account for life, and they did not renew our account after 12 months, so all I can say as I would not trust these guys. Over the space of the year, we found that our site was down more often, and that it was slower to respond. So if you are considering Zyma, I would not go with them as a provider.”

Never mind that was a 2012 update, a far cry from the complaints they also received in October 2011. It seems the only reason that they did an update was because of the removal of free hosting. I did not see anything in the email that was sent to me by zyma.com that stated a free for life account; then again I saw nothing of how long the free hosting would last. I can’t see any affiliate links despite the previous endorsement still intact below this despite a warning to avoid zyma.com.

Is Zyma.com a scam?

It would be safe to say that Zyma.com was a scam if people did not say that their websites had come back up.  But sites have come up. There is a back story that has yet to be told. I can only speculate as to what the cause was. But I personally feel the only way Zyma.com can move forwards is to get some pricing similar to the competitors they try to compete with. It was ok in the beginning, maybe in the first month to bring new customers end. But in the long run it’s a bad idea to not have a package that ensures a company does not struggle.

If anything I think Zyma.com is at worse a company that treads on despite its failures.