http://www.hostingnow.co.nz/

They do a well priced local here in Auckland VPS offering

Vetta Technologies, nice little timaru based company, who now have offices in Christchurch and Auckland. NZ based hosting from an Auckland data center (Or US if you prefer), the cheapest plan is $10 + GST per month

Thanks for all the suggestions folks.

Like the OP I'm also looking for managed hosting for my wordpress site and am considering a VPS. I also want a plug and play solution with Cpanel that requires no work at the OS/Apache/DB level as I know nothing and just want to do the wordpress stuff.

I'm on a Freeparking Wordpress hosting plan at the moment but I'm having lots of resource issues, even running the site through Cloudflare. I'm running a online community (www.AdventureRidingNZ.co.nz) with WordPress/BBPress/BuddyPress. Currently we've got 1360 members and growing by about 50 per month, with 160 pages of content which is also expanding and could be over 200 by the end of the year. Before we implemented cloudflare we were doing about 50gb of traffic a month, now it's more like 20, and need about 6GB of space for the site, though that will increase over time also.

Crazydomains prices seem ok but some of the feedback online not so much?  https://www.crazydomains.co.nz/virtual-servers/

Having set up and maintained an Nginx/HHVM VM on AWS mostly for Wordpress I second the idea of using EasyEngine on a VPS, but there will still be some administration you need to do. Alternately a managed Wordpress specialist host like WPEngine will do everything for you, ensure good performance with a CDN, but will cost min US$25 a month and up to US$100/month.

Personally I still like AWS, hosted in Sydney for NZ customers, CloudFlare in front, but administration is a pain. Not sure if there are specialist Wordpress hosts in NZ. CPanel VPS hosting may be a good option.

I would also suggest if you are using shared hosting, to setup a clean wordpress install on another server to act as a CDN. Also use caching plugins and cloudfalre. I was able to speed up a relatively slow wordpress website substantially doing this. The problem with wordpress these days is that it does have quite high server demands. The problem with sharedhosting is people buy the cheapest,and over time as the server fills up, the website just gets slower and slower if you don't use caching etc.

Eddieb:

 

Like the OP I'm also looking for managed hosting for my wordpress site and am considering a VPS. I also want a plug and play solution with Cpanel that requires no work at the OS/Apache/DB level as I know nothing and just want to do the wordpress stuff.

 

 

 

What you're looking for is known as a "Managed VPS" - probably won't be cheap tho.  Why cPanel?

Managed VPS in NZ is going to cost you $100 a month or so. I know from experience that an AWS t2.micro can handle this load without any problems, free for a year, then US$10/month. You might want to expand to 2GB RAM and two cores, which is US$20/month. EasyEngine to set it up and you'll be sweet. Suggest that you'd want to use Ubuntu 16.04 (released in a few weeks) not 14.04 and not Amazon Linux.

I'm going to try moving to Ubuntu 16.04 and EasyEngine on AWS in 4-6 weeks (from a manual install) so if you're not in a hurry you could wait and see. I already have a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up Wordpress on AWS - down to the "type this command" level.

mattwnz:

 

 I would also suggest if you are using shared hosting, to setup a clean wordpress install on another server to act as a CDN. Also use caching plugins and cloudfalre. I was able to speed up a relatively slow wordpress website substantially doing this. The problem with wordpress these days is that it does have quite high server demands. The problem with sharedhosting is people buy the cheapest,and over time as the server fills up, the website just gets slower and slower if you don't use caching etc.

 

I don't understand this - why would you need another Wordpress instance to act as a CDN? Just use a CDN.

ubergeeknz:

 

Eddieb:

 

Like the OP I'm also looking for managed hosting for my wordpress site and am considering a VPS. I also want a plug and play solution with Cpanel that requires no work at the OS/Apache/DB level as I know nothing and just want to do the wordpress stuff.

 

 

 

 

What you're looking for is known as a "Managed VPS" - probably won't be cheap tho.  Why cPanel?

 

Because cPanel gives me access to everything I need and I know my way around it. I know NOTHING at the OS/Apache/MYSQL/PHP app level.

Has anyone worked with http://www.wordhost.co.nz?

timmmay:

 

I'm going to try moving to Ubuntu 16.04 and EasyEngine on AWS in 4-6 weeks (from a manual install) so if you're not in a hurry you could wait and see. I already have a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up Wordpress on AWS - down to the "type this command" level.

 

My current hosting expires mid June so I'm keen to get started in shifting things sooner than later.

I'm using OpenHost for a club website, and haven't really had any problems if that's any help?

Wordhost seem to be website developers, not hosts. What are you after from them?

You've already said you know nothing about technology, so you need managed VPS ($50 - $100/month in NZ) or shared hosting. Looks like you're hitting the limits of shared hosting, so VPS is most likely. So do you want to pay the $100/month, or do you want to try a VPS and use a third party for setup and such?

timmmay:

 

Managed VPS in NZ is going to cost you $100 a month or so. I know from experience that an AWS t2.micro can handle this load without any problems, free for a year, then US$10/month. You might want to expand to 2GB RAM and two cores, which is US$20/month. EasyEngine to set it up and you'll be sweet. Suggest that you'd want to use Ubuntu 16.04 (released in a few weeks) not 14.04 and not Amazon Linux.

 

I'm going to try moving to Ubuntu 16.04 and EasyEngine on AWS in 4-6 weeks (from a manual install) so if you're not in a hurry you could wait and see. I already have a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up Wordpress on AWS - down to the "type this command" level.

 

mattwnz:

 

 I would also suggest if you are using shared hosting, to setup a clean wordpress install on another server to act as a CDN. Also use caching plugins and cloudfalre. I was able to speed up a relatively slow wordpress website substantially doing this. The problem with wordpress these days is that it does have quite high server demands. The problem with sharedhosting is people buy the cheapest,and over time as the server fills up, the website just gets slower and slower if you don't use caching etc.

 

 

I don't understand this - why would you need another Wordpress instance to act as a CDN? Just use a CDN.

 

 

 

Some plugins allow you to do do this where it can load the core wordpress files from another server, and is a cheaper option than using a third party CDN service, if you have access to another server in another location. Guessing it reduces the load on the main websites server, as it is not needing to load as many files off the server. I initially tried it as a test,  but I have found it does speed up the website quite a bit.

mattwnz:

 

 

 

Some plugins allow you to do do this where it can load the core wordpress files from another server, and is a cheaper option than using a third party CDN service, if you have access to another server in another location. Guessing it reduces the load on the main websites server, as it is not needing to load as many files off the server. I initially tried it as a test,  but I have found it does speed up the website quite a bit.

 

That's a strange solution, poor mans load balancing or geo load balancing. Complexity sounds higher than ideal.

CloudFlare is a free CDN with nodes in 100 cities spread across the world, including Auckland. They have a paid tier. Geekzone runs in Sydney, I believe, with CloudFlare CDN in Auckland.

timmmay:

 

mattwnz:

 

 

 

Some plugins allow you to do do this where it can load the core wordpress files from another server, and is a cheaper option than using a third party CDN service, if you have access to another server in another location. Guessing it reduces the load on the main websites server, as it is not needing to load as many files off the server. I initially tried it as a test,  but I have found it does speed up the website quite a bit.

 

 

That's a strange solution, poor mans load balancing or geo load balancing. Complexity sounds higher than ideal.

 

CloudFlare is a free CDN with nodes in 100 cities spread across the world, including Auckland. They have a paid tier. Geekzone runs in Sydney, I believe, with CloudFlare CDN in Auckland.

 

Also use cloudflares free option  too, although that doesn't make as much difference. I use WP Super Caches CDN Support, where they  recommend for static files, you pull them from another site or CDN to improve speed, which is basically what it does. It means the files aren't all loading from the same server which is apparently a bit of a bottle neck. Anyway it does make a significant enough difference over Cloudsflare by itself.

When I was using shared hosting in the US CloudFlare dropped page load times from 10s to about 2-3s, a huge improvement. This is a site with lots of JS, CSS, and large images.

HTTP/2 (HTTP/2 demo here) which in practice only works over HTTPS makes domain sharding (ie loading resources from different domains) redundant. There's only one connection to the server, all resources are sent over that. All of my sites are HTTP/2 enabled using Let's Encrypt certificates, and all modern browsers support HTTP/2. I did fairly extensive performance testing and I'm pretty happy with it.

If CloudFlare isn't helping you maybe it's not set up fully - you do need to either set up your headers properly or use page rules to override them to ensure static resources are cached on the CDN. If you don't do that it won't help much at all. Set up properly it will have the same effect as configuring a CDN in a Wordpress plugin, though actually more because of HTTP2, minification, etc.

If you need help with it drop me a PM.