Zen - up to the hype?

I had some problems with the reliability of my last preferred supplier (5 days of email problems - not good for a business!), so I thought I would have a look round for the best rated service, and it seemed that Zen was the name that sprang forward.

Now I have to say that they have been pretty good overall. Setup was painless, and reliability has been excellent.

However there were a couple of things I found slightly odd:

Firstly, there is no facility to make DNS changes yourself for domain names. I can kind of see where that is coming from because there is huge scope to mess up your service, but I had to wait a couple of days to get a basic setting changed (which usually takes all of about 2 minutes).

I also bought a domain name and wanted anyone typing it into a web site to get referred to a different web site (it's called web forwarding). With another ISP, you just type in the domain name you want it to go to, click update and then the next day of you go. But not with Zen, I asked, and after a few days of circulating round the system was told the facility was not available.

So overall, I am pleased, after all reliability is the main thing. But sometimes it is nice to have a few of the extras as well....Any comments Zen?

This board is not part of the official Zen support service.
While Zen rep's are around very regulary, it's often in their own time.

Why not communicate with them directly; email, telephone etc.?

Edited by deleted (Fri 20-Oct-06 07:32:30)

Zen aren't as good as they used to be. Customer service in particular has suffered a serious deterioration in recent months. But they are still probably the best ISP out there, even with the restrictive caps and OTT extra gigs charges.

Which pretty much tells you how awful the state of the market is in the UK right now.

Very helpful. Except he wasn't asking about some customer services rant. He was asking about extra services.

In reply to:

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Which pretty much tells you how awful the state of the market is in the UK right now.

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Ya can say that again Stention!

CT23, for quality of actual service ya really can't do better than zen still. I've got to say the vast majority of the time it works out of the box and well. Any issues I had (apart from zen's DNS issues) have been down to BT and resolved quickly. Plus we're not talking ya regular ISP automitons at zen, we're talking educated folks who care about service delivery. Thats something special considering how awful the state of the market in the UK is right now.......

Edited by buggerlugz (Fri 20-Oct-06 10:01:49)

Worry ye not, there are improvements in the works...

I echo Gorskar, we realsie there are some missing services. New portule modules are on the way to address these. Watch this space.

As usual, the two "usual suspects" come out of the woodwork to complain, even though they resolutely cling on to Zen like a limpet to a ship's hull.

Unfortunately it's not as easy to increase tech support when it's not based in Mumbai, and not based on a bunch of uni graduates reading from a computer script in broken English over a poor quality VoIP line.

did i complain? I ask you!

You can moan on about me and stention all ya like, the fact remains zen are the best of a rotting industry slowly going down the UK broadband toilet, the only difference with zen is the air freshener on the side of the pan keeps things smelling nicer for longer.