Lypha Introduction

Lypha’s official name is Lypha Networks, and it hosts more than 71,000 websites (or 74,000, depending on which but of the site you’re reading). According to its website, Lypha has clients in 78 countries. It’s difficult to harvest much background information about its history. The company’s office is based in Miami, although it appears that its support staff work remotely.

Lypha emphasises its low prices and is particularly keen to push shared hosting. All of its hosting is Linux-only.

Lypha Hosting Plans

Lypha focuses on two types of hosting: shared and reseller.

● Shared hosting is available in two forms: the Simple plan and the Economy plan. Economy is basically an unlimited plan on Linux; Simple has resource restrictions, although these are fairly generous.

● Lypha’s reseller hosting is provided across three packages. All give the customer the chance to host unlimited domains and use unbranded nameservers; Lypha also provides private nameserver registration. The host is keen to emphasise the fact that reseller hosting is completely anonymous once set up, so the reseller’s customers would never know who the ‘real’ provider is.

Lypha Uptime/Downtime

Lypha offers an uptime guarantee of 99.998%, which sounds impressive, but this figure is measured over a six-month period. Most hosts measure uptime month-by-month. As such, you’re less likely to be able to claim an account credit for a major incident that results in the loss of service, even though the figures initially look good.

The company has a server status page which provides detailed response times, uptime figures and more. These figures are supposed to be updated every five minutes, but I reloaded them several times over an hour and they didn’t change at all. A more general network status page returned a 404 error and there’s no archived uptime data.

There’s a page on the Lypha website that explains the security features and tech at its data centre, but there’s actually no information about where that data centre is. The virtual tour refers to a facility in Denver County in the US, but gives no address. On the company’s server status page, it claims to have servers in Los Angeles, Houston, Dusseldorf and London.

Lypha’s terms of service document suggests that it keeps backups in some form, but doesn’t say these will be volunteered in the event of a problem. In the support documentation, users are encouraged to make their own.

Lypha Support

Technical support is available 24/7 all year round, and Lypha offers support via email, live chat and a ticketing system. On the company’s jobs page, it states that technicians are hired remotely and do not work off-site, so it’s fair to assume that some technical support staff may not be located within the USA.

Lypha also has a knowledgebase, a ‘support centre’ (effectively a collection of FAQs) and a variety of forms that customers must use to administrate their account. For example, you’ll need to use the Change Account Plan form to upgrade or downgrade your package; there are 12 different forms to choose from.

Lypha in the News

I was unable to find any press reports about Lypha Networks; perhaps the host is too small to have warranted any attention from blogs or reporters.

Lypha Control Panel

Lypha customers on shared and reseller packages get access to cPanel. However, according to the demo, the version of cPanel in use is positively ancient. There’s no date, but the fact that there’s a note in the footer recommending ‘IE4 or higher’ should give you some idea of its vintage; IE4 was released in 1997.

On reseller accounts, Lypha offers WHM. However, I was quite alarmed to see that the demo is a ten-year-old version of WHM (dated 2003 in its footer). Needless to say, it looks completely different to the current version and has considerably fewer features.

In short - we’d hope that Lypha isn’t rolling out these ageing control panels to clients, but in the absence of any other evidence, caution is definitely required in this area.

Lypha Extras

Customers on Lypha’s shared hosting plans receive a free domain (when they pay for hosting annually), free search engine submission and a collection of 110 one-click install scripts, including WordPress and Joomla. This is marketed as a time-sensitive offer, but I notice that the expiry date of the offer changed depending on when I visited the site, so we can assume it’s a rolling deal.

On reseller plans, Lypha claims that its free WHM licence would ordinarily cost $100 month, but this price is extremely out-of-date. A full cPanel/WHM licence on a dedicated server costs far less than this, so take that with a pinch of salt.

Resellers do get access to SWSoft SiteBuilder and Complete WebsiteBuilder, both site builder tools. The latter is provided ‘until license expiry’; it’s not clear what the licence is or how long it runs for.

Lypha Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy

Lypha customers can claim a refund within 30 days if they’re not satisfied with its services. This isn’t defined further in the Terms of Service.

There’s nothing in the legal documentation that covers mid-term cancellations.

Lypha Summary

Initially I liked the look of Lypha as a hosting company, but my enthusiasm did wane as I compiled this review. The network monitor that never updates is misleading. The uptime guarantee is not what it seems thanks to a six-month rolling window for uptime calculation. I was most concerned about the version of cPanel and WHM that are provided as demos. Even if the company rolls out newer versions to clients, it’s not acceptable that its demonstration copies are more than ten years out of date.

If you desperately wanted unbranded, anonymous webspace for your reseller business, take a look at its prices - but weigh up the inconsistency of information before you part with any money.