Are there benefits to using a NZ Website hosting company ?

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jaybeedee

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#133517 24-Oct-2013 22:51

We're migrating a website - not paticularly big, not particularly high traffic. Wordpress With some large images, ecommerce and DPS payment gateway. Most of the visitors we would expect to be NZ based.

Does it matter whether it is hosted on a cheap plan from someone like JustHost or choosing a locally hosting company.

What should we be thinking about ?

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#921248 24-Oct-2013 23:29

Most local hosts include free national traffic.

Zeon

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#921249 24-Oct-2013 23:31

Especially if you have large images choose a NZ host, it will be faster and you often will get better support.

Speedtest 2019-10-14

mattwnz

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#921251 24-Oct-2013 23:38

Yes, often better support, as they are usually NZ based too, and files should also load faster. Would suggest never buying solely on price, even in NZ, because cheap hosting can sometime be very slow when hosting dynamic website like wordpress. Also look for other things like backups, redundancy, how long they have been around for, whether they are really NZ based, or just an overseas company with a nz domain etc.

Best thing to do is email a few with a few questions and see how long they take to reply, as it is often a good test of their support.

1080p

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#921324 25-Oct-2013 02:17

No. International companies (by in large) provide support on par or better than companies in New Zealand for a much smaller price.

Loading faster is a hilarious argument given that the average user will never notice the difference in loading speeds. Also consider that a large number of Telecom/Vodafone traffic might end up randomly going to the US/Australia and back again anyway due to peering politics.

myfullflavour

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#921361 25-Oct-2013 07:54

1080p: No. International companies (by in large) provide support on par or better than companies in New Zealand for a much smaller price.

Loading faster is a hilarious argument given that the average user will never notice the difference in loading speeds. Also consider that a large number of Telecom/Vodafone traffic might end up randomly going to the US/Australia and back again anyway due to peering politics.

I disagree.

1) The under $10 / month are typically poor at support. They promise 24/7 phone support but when you go to use it, you sit in long queues and deal with L1 techs who have no idea. Most of these hosts outsource their support to India for peanuts. Nothing like a good local company who can actually *help*.

2) There is a speed difference. Example is a customer who has a flash video on their site. When it was with dreamhost, 100-150K downloads of the file was a pretty typical experience. Now that the site is local, it downloads for the end-user at near wire speed.

3) Uploading lots of smaller files to an NZ or AU-based host is significantly faster than to the US, just on latency savings.

jnimmo

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#921371 25-Oct-2013 08:26

I also disagree with 1080p. Especially if your website is for customers and even more if for ecommerce.
If people are searching for your products and have a range of websites to choose to buy from, response time is important, and local hosts should give you a faster response time.
Always a good idea to point any javascript libraries like jQuery to Google's libraries or something too; most people would already have Google's jQuery in their cache which means it doesn't have to download it off your server (and will download in parallel if they don't have it cached)

Ragnor

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#921775 25-Oct-2013 16:28

1080p:

Loading faster is a hilarious argument given that the average user will never notice the difference in loading speeds.

Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all done extensive research on how latency affects sales/bounce rates/etc.

Speed does matter.

If the audience is NZ based, host in NZ or use a CDN.

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mattwnz

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#921803 25-Oct-2013 17:54

Ragnor:
1080p:

Loading faster is a hilarious argument given that the average user will never notice the difference in loading speeds.

Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all done extensive research on how latency affects sales/bounce rates/etc.

Speed does matter.

If the audience is NZ based, host in NZ or use a CDN.

Absolutely agree.

The other thing is that some search engines if with an overseas host, and using an international domains may detect the website as an overseas one. You can set google to manually approve as a NZ one, but other search engines may not be so easy.

My experience with hosting support from overseas hosts, is that they only tend to reply in one line, and only read the first question. So if you have multiple questions, you are best to open multiple tickets. You also may be dealing with a huge number of people, I had one ticket that had replies from about 10 different people, and it is very frustrating to have to keep repeating and explaining things, especially if the english isn't good.

mattwnz

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#921832 25-Oct-2013 18:21

jnimmo: I also disagree with 1080p. Especially if your website is for customers and even more if for ecommerce.
If people are searching for your products and have a range of websites to choose to buy from, response time is important, and local hosts should give you a faster response time.

Some international SaaS ecommerce systems do have CDNs around the world, so isn't such an issue these days.

nunz

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#939565 23-Nov-2013 17:35

biggest argument for NZ hosting. you can march into their office and look em in the eye. most overseas support is pure rubbish.

goDaddy, Aplus, etc etc etc - have all been slow as molasses and their support and service have been absolute crud.

sitehost in Nz is brilliant. discount domains used to be good but their help desk has degraded badly over the last six or so months.

We have pulled all our hosting from overseas back into NZ. Much happier now.

MurrayM

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#941589 27-Nov-2013 10:38

I too prefer local NZ hosting for my customer's sites.

I like to be able to ring them up and speak to an actual technician that knows what he's talking about rather than some support person behind a desk in India.

jarledb

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#941598 27-Nov-2013 10:51

So, any NZ hosting companies that are good? And by that I mean not having overbooked servers and with good support.

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gundar

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#941610 27-Nov-2013 11:00

Totally agree with 1080p. Over the last four or five years I've used hosts in and out of NZ. I advocate for hosts abroad given the disparity of cost and service, but also, good hosts overseas don't produce the lag effect everybody claims. I've had local hosts produce worse traffic statistics than hosts thousands of kilometers away at 4-5 times the cost difference.

Local support varies. There are some good guys out there, but being told at 4pm that 'sorry, we're on our way out the door, can you spare $300 for a call out fee' is a response I've had from one of the biggest local hosting companies in NZ. I migrated out the next week.

Currently my clients sites are hosted through a locally based company that has a VPS farm overseas. Best support I've ever had, best pricing I've ever had, enough that I can setup over spec VPSs rather than living in shared hosting platforms.

Having said all that it all boils down to researching your tools and market - everybody has different needs and skills. Most hosts will give you a 30day account, use this to test the performance and responses you expect. Get some references and while in your 30day period, make sure to call their helpdesk a few times at odd intervals to see if they are able to answer the phone with helpful information rather than requests for more money or lame blame games.

PM me if you would like some off topic advice or recommendations.

Ragnor

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#941711 27-Nov-2013 13:28

jarledb: So, any NZ hosting companies that are good? And by that I mean not having overbooked servers and with good support.

http://www.sitehost.co.nz/
http://www.openhost.co.nz/
https://www.affinity.net.nz/

mattwnz

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#941714 27-Nov-2013 13:33

Also I was told by a web developer that having a NZ site on NZ based servers can improve SEO. I don't really know why a NZ business would host overseas these days, unless their market is offshore.

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