NZ webhosting for wordpress: recommendations?

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deadlyllama

1260 posts

Uber Geek

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#175125 18-Jun-2015 10:53

I need to sort some NZ based hosting for a local charity. They'll be running Wordpress. Their budget is not huge.

Who's out there that's good, and costs no more than $20/mo?

"Good" means the service is reliable, their servers aren't overloaded, and they answer support tickets within 12 hours.

Bananabob

511 posts

Ultimate Geek

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#1327130 18-Jun-2015 10:59

I use Kiwi Hosting but I think the servers are overseas. I have always found them prompt to reply and are fairly priced.

Yabanize

2350 posts

Uber Geek

#1327160 18-Jun-2015 11:31

I use Vetta Technologies LTD, A growing company which started in Timaru. I find them to be very helpful and reliable.

Disclaimer: This is my affiliate link

ubergeeknz

3344 posts

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Vocus

#1327162 18-Jun-2015 11:34

Have used OpenHost in the past. Great service and reliable. But tbh, you may be better to get any hosting and put CloudFlare in front (which is free) - that way if they suddenly get hit with a lot of traffic, it will handle it.

Dulouz

883 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1327170 18-Jun-2015 11:40

I use GoDaddy, although they're not NZ hosted I find performance pretty good and they have decent support.

Amanon

deadlyllama

1260 posts

Uber Geek

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#1327172 18-Jun-2015 11:41

ubergeeknz: Have used OpenHost in the past. Great service and reliable. But tbh, you may be better to get any hosting and put CloudFlare in front (which is free) - that way if they suddenly get hit with a lot of traffic, it will handle it.

I know about cloudflare. It breaks the mobile wordpress addon I was using because it can't do server-side user agent sniffing :-( This isn't a complete dealbreaker though.

I'm mostly after the good service side. I want something I can leave running and expect it will keep working. I'd use a cheap VPS but then I have to keep it patched/etc and very quickly it becomes cheaper to buy bog standard shared PHP+MySQL hosting from someone else.

I could just sign up to something like bluehost/dreamhost/etc but I'm having real trouble finding credible reviews. Lots of "reviews" that are just a list of published features with an affiliate link at the end.

w00t

51 posts

Master Geek

#1327173 18-Jun-2015 11:41

I know it's not really the answer you are looking for, but for around that sort of money you can run your own t2.micro instance in Amazon Web Services with the Bitnami Wordpress stack AMI.

I've done this for a charity and a club in the past. You gain a lot of control over themes and plugins etc, but you obviously inherit all of the admin responsibilities like availability and backups as well.

Just thought I'd mention it

Part of the reason for having done this is the hosting place they were using went tits-up which caused a few domain transfer issues too.

EDIT - didn't see all the the above posts before replying!

deadlyllama

1260 posts

Uber Geek

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#1327192 18-Jun-2015 11:57

w00t: I know it's not really the answer you are looking for, but for around that sort of money you can run your own t2.micro instance in Amazon Web Services with the Bitnami Wordpress stack AMI.

I've done this for a charity and a club in the past. You gain a lot of control over themes and plugins etc, but you obviously inherit all of the admin responsibilities like availability and backups as well.

Just thought I'd mention it Part of the reason for having done this is the hosting place they were using went tits-up which caused a few domain transfer issues too.

EDIT - didn't see all the the above posts before replying!

I'd register the domain name separately, and use CloudFlare for DNS if nothing else. We'll use Google Apps (now free to NZ nonprofits via TechSoup) for email/etc. And yeah, I really don't want another virtual server to maintain.

Equinox IT

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ubergeeknz

3344 posts

Uber Geek

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Vocus

#1327202 18-Jun-2015 12:10

deadlyllama:
ubergeeknz: Have used OpenHost in the past. Great service and reliable. But tbh, you may be better to get any hosting and put CloudFlare in front (which is free) - that way if they suddenly get hit with a lot of traffic, it will handle it.

I know about cloudflare. It breaks the mobile wordpress addon I was using because it can't do server-side user agent sniffing :-( This isn't a complete dealbreaker though.

I'm mostly after the good service side. I want something I can leave running and expect it will keep working. I'd use a cheap VPS but then I have to keep it patched/etc and very quickly it becomes cheaper to buy bog standard shared PHP+MySQL hosting from someone else.

I could just sign up to something like bluehost/dreamhost/etc but I'm having real trouble finding credible reviews. Lots of "reviews" that are just a list of published features with an affiliate link at the end.

All good. Well up until 2 years ago I used Openhost for a very long time, and had no problems to speak of, also it was very fast (compared with Kiwihost which I had used prior). On the few occasions I did have to contact them, they got back to me quickly.

deadlyllama

1260 posts

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#1327644 19-Jun-2015 09:20

Thanks for all your advice (both here and by PMs). Openhost has clearly been around for a while, and they're NZ based and ubergeeknz says they're good, and that's good enough for me. We'll go with them.