Taking into account that HostingZoom most likely practices overselling , the servers can get pretty crowded. Fortunately, they’re still somewhere near the industry average for shared plans — their Apollo server, for example, hosts about 381 sites at the time of this writing. By the way, according to their web site, the semi-dedicated plan has 90% less users than shared — you got a choice there. So, we give them four stars for this category.

That one is always hard to judge. We can distinguish quality as it relates to customer service, and as it relates to technical aspects of hosting.

Customer Service

Customers are supported 24/7 by email and live chat along with telephone support during normal business hours.
Our quick scan on the web hosting forums did not reveal negative incidents with customer support. Just in case, do your own research.

Reliability

Hosting Zoom’s About Us page claims that they use equipment consisting of Dell, Intel, Cisco, Juniper, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Their “network is fully meshed and redundant with 10 tier one backbone providers with at least 1Gbps or greater uplink which includes AboveNet, AT&T, Broadwing, Global Crossing, Level3, nLayer, Sprint, Time Warner, UUNET, and Verio.”

What this means is that if one of the connections fails, the others take over. This is a standard set up and expected. However, believe it or not, you’re site may still be offline.

There’s more about their network here: http://hostingzoom.com/network.html

So, overall 4,5 for this category.

Ouch. No one wants to disclose this. Fortunately, you can get the idea by visiting this little page http://www.dailychanges.com/ and searching for nswebhost.com. You get the latest movements of domain names, in’s, out’s and totals. We’ll try to get some sort of monitoring utility in place, so that you could track the hosts of interest. But for now, you simply have to visit the pages regularly to get an idea of where the hosting company is moving.

No rating here, as we simply don’t know much about HosingZoom in this regard.
Anyway, they were on position 57 of the most active name servers on 11/15/05:
57 NSWEBHOST.COM 86 31 -31 -5 81 0.32% 25,598

With 25K+ domains on their servers, you can assume they’re doing alright.

Their Terms of Service say it best:
“Without waiving any of its other rights under this Agreement, Hosting Zoom offers to its Customers a 30-day money-back guarantee on fees for hosting services only (the “30-Day Guarantee”). If for any reason you cancel your account by filling in the account cancellation form and submitting it to Hosting Zoom, within thirty (30) days of the beginning of your service, Hosting Zoom will refund your money with no questions asked; provided, however, that you have never previously obtained a refund under the 30-Day Guarantee. If you have ever previously obtained a refund under the 30-Day Guarantee, your account will be canceled, but no money will be refunded to you.”

So, at least two points to keep in mind. One: your setup fee is not refunded (they charge $19.95 set up fee on orders less than 12 months for shared hosting). So, it seems like that if you want to move after 30 days and you paid for a year, you won’t get a refund.

Two: You have to fill in the cancellation form. And where’s the form? Well, try finding it on their web site. It’s there!

Our rating? Taking all this into account, we give them 3 stars.

Hosting Zoom provides a website transfer service. It seems like it’s free, but please check directly with them to make sure it is. Once again, we challenge you to find the Website Transfer form. OK, OK, it’s accessible from the Contact button, under Forms and Documents. It seems that the only hope in finding anything on the site is to use the Sitemap feature.

Hosting Zoom does not allow adult sites. We couldn’t find any mention of proxies in the Acceptable Use policy, but we bet they are not allowed either. So, unless you’re an adult webmaster, you’re good to go.

Also, as of this writing, none of the servers were backlisted for spam. Another good news for you.
With this we bestow a five star rating in the Neighborhood category.

In conclusion, Hosting Zoom comes across like a reputable place to host your site. Or at least it’s worth investigating their offers.

You now expect an overall rating, don’t you?
Here at Best Web Hosting Provider, we don’t give overall ratings because we believe overall ratings are…well, overall — they’re not precise, and often misleading.

So, that’s it. Let us know if your opinion differs, or you uncover useful information about HZ.

For now, take care, and come back for the next review.