Spark NZ web hosting

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PeterMil

14 posts

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#281501 21-Feb-2021 22:35

I have an old website set up a number of years ago on Spark web hosting. It's $14.95 a month and just ticks along. It's more of a basic catalogue site with a few contact details product pictures and so on. (No e-commerce or anything too fancy.)

During the holidays I had some spare time so I created a new website in HTML5 and it looks a lot better and more modern. I planned on switching out my old website with my new one and sticking it up on the Spark web hosting server.

Question - in 2021 how does Spark rate for security? I've heard of two different people who had their sites hacked there. Any thoughts appreciated.

It's just cheaper for me to continue with Spark, but I can look elsewhere if necessary.

Cheers

xpd

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#2660894 21-Feb-2021 22:56

I'd say it was more likely the package they were running on Spark hosting that got hacked rather than Sparks infrastructure. ie: Wordpress etc

And $14.95 a month for hosting is not cheap, especially if its just static pages.

Gavin / xpd / FastRaccoon / Geek of Coastguard New Zealand

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#2660897 21-Feb-2021 23:07

I'd second @xpd.

In this day and age I'd personally recommend either cloud hosting (think AWS or Azure) or a dedicated webhost (eg. Dreamhost). You'll probably find that you can host static pages for a fraction of what you are paying.

I've used Spark hosting services before and whilst they work... the pricing, support and features are a bit dated. According to their support pages, they've got some fairly old packages running on their servers (eg. PHP, Joomla, Wordpress...) .

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mattwnz

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#2660899 22-Feb-2021 00:02

Does it have SSL? Hosting often needs a reasonable level of support from my experience, and that is something that can be a problem these days with some hosts, and many now use overseas support where it can be frustrating to get them to understand. So recommend using one that has entirely NZ based support even if it costs a bit more. But hosting is relatively cheap, unless you start to have higher resource requirements.

Dolts

214 posts

Master Geek

#2660936 22-Feb-2021 09:14

If it's just a static site, you can host on https://www.netlify.com/ for free

They handle SSL certs via Let's Encrypt.

I host a few there with no issues.

PeterMil

14 posts

Geek

#2661547 22-Feb-2021 23:08

Thanks very much for everybody’s input and answers. All extremely helpful. Cheers, Pete :)