Need suggestion for VPS server for NZ

Forums › IT Pro and developers › Need suggestion for VPS server for NZ

TheRobot

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#323380 26-Nov-2025 11:04

Has anyone here used RackNerd or other american server for sites targeting NZ? Their Black Friday prices look great, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for a new startup. Worth it or should I look elsewhere?

I know there must be some latency but I have no idea how good or bad it would be.

danfaulknor

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Prodigi

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#3437633 26-Nov-2025 11:14

That pricing is pretty impressive. Economies of scale that we can never hope to reach in NZ.

If you put something like Cloudflare in front of your site/service, it would be pretty usable. You'd want to pick West coast locations like LA for the best latency.

For a startup, I'd say go for it but consider having budget ready for when you take off to move servers to New Zealand for a better experience for your users.
Alternatively, both Microsoft and Amazon have startup programmes, which give you a bunch of credit to use their services.

they/them

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hamish225

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#3437648 26-Nov-2025 11:48

Voyager do VPS's hosted in Auckland, unless you're specifically looking for something outside of NZ of course. https://voyager.nz/business/hosting/virtual-servers

If you wanted something more premium with a few more features / options, we also have Virtual Data Centre which can be Christchurch or Auckland: https://voyager.nz/business/hosting/virtual-data-centre

Disclaimer: I work for voyager

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danfaulknor

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Prodigi

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#3437649 26-Nov-2025 11:54

hamish225:

Voyager do VPS's hosted in Auckland

We do too, but given OP was looking at VPSs that top out at $110/year, I figured it was a bit early for local NZ suggestions :)

they/them

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taneb1

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Mercury

#3437652 26-Nov-2025 12:05

I've currently got 6 servers with Racknerd - The oldest from 2023, all pretty low spec but serve their purpose well - They are more for hosting personal projects, rather than websites.

Touch wood, have had almost zero downtime minus maybe 1 incident where where it was down for maybe an hour.

As Dan said, if you chuck Cloudflare in front of it, should be fine.

Any comments made are my personal views and does not represent those of my employer

CamH

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#3437655 26-Nov-2025 12:35

I have a Racknerd server that I set up in March 2021 to do some testing. $13.99 per year, just logged in via SSH and apparently it's been online since then.

They're pretty well respected in the LowEnd community. I personally wouldn't use them for critical production stuff, but they do appear pretty solid on the face of things.

BlakJak

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#3437662 26-Nov-2025 13:14

My VPS is with Vultr operating out of Australia. I've had pretty good service out of them, considering my shoestring budget. Prior to this I had my own hardware colo'd so it was my first exposure to doing services virtually.

No signature to see here, move along...

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timmmay

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#3437696 26-Nov-2025 15:22

AWS LightSail out of Sydney costs US$5 per month (about NZ$105 / year) and is about 35ms latency. Otherwise the Oracle Cloud free tier is very generous and very reliable.

noroad

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#3437701 26-Nov-2025 15:50

TheRobot:

Has anyone here used RackNerd or other american server for sites targeting NZ? Their Black Friday prices look great, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for a new startup. Worth it or should I look elsewhere?

I know there must be some latency but I have no idea how good or bad it would be.

Racknerd is my go to VPS host for International stuff, have had good results for several years and great prices.

aj6828

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#3438085 27-Nov-2025 23:17

i have a few with OVH dedicated and VPS not bad at all ..

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jupjohn

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#3438118 28-Nov-2025 09:45

Throwing more options out there based on what I use:

If you don't mind the complexity of public cloud, Azure's New Zealand North region has some cheap-ish (for Azure) instances. I run my incus cluster there - although it was cheaper when I reserved capacity a few months ago (thanks Lachlan in the Quic Discord):
Outside of NZ, I've always used Hetzner for VPSes. They've got reasonably priced & reliable boxes in Oregon & Singapore - both of which are ~120ms away.
If you don't need a VM AND have a container image(s)/packable apps to deploy, the rest of my stack runs on fly.io across the U.S. and Sydney. You can also reserve machine capacity with them for ~35% savings.

BlakJak

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#3439527 2-Dec-2025 14:56

Random aside - received spam from a RackNerd IP today. Based on their apparent credibility for this thread I engaged with them via their webform for abuse.

Generally the transaction was

"hey, here's the headers of a spam email from your IP, the email address concerned is basically unused so there was never any consent, take appropriate action"

'Hi, thanks, we've notified the customer of your report and will give them 72 hours to reply'

"um... the customer who may be the offender, now has exactly _what_ info? What did you tell them?"

'we will now consider your ticket closed'

So... not impressed to be honest. I mean props for a really fast response (minutes) but ignoring my follow-up was not great.
Only thing I can assume is that, the follow-up was via email and came from a different address on my part, so perhaps it was filtered out somehow.

No signature to see here, move along...

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noroad

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#3439531 2-Dec-2025 15:21

BlakJak:

So... not impressed to be honest. I mean props for a really fast response (minutes) but ignoring my follow-up was not great.
Only thing I can assume is that, the follow-up was via email and came from a different address on my part, so perhaps it was filtered out somehow.

You got a reply at all from a VPS supplier, I would suggest you should be impressed.

muppet

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#3439540 2-Dec-2025 16:17

I have one VM I got for cheap years ago with RackNerd. They're great, though I don't like their portal when it comes to powering on a VM, trying to get to grub can be a PITA.

But they're good and mostly reliable, I've had the VM reboot due to outages on their end a few times, not the same as DigitalOcean, but DO is twice the price.

BlakJak

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#3439644 2-Dec-2025 21:37

noroad:

BlakJak:

So... not impressed to be honest. I mean props for a really fast response (minutes) but ignoring my follow-up was not great.
Only thing I can assume is that, the follow-up was via email and came from a different address on my part, so perhaps it was filtered out somehow.

You got a reply at all from a VPS supplier, I would suggest you should be impressed.

haha you're not wrong really!

But given that I generally just blackhole subnets instead of engaging with their hosts - except where I know the hosts are willing to engage properly - I now doubt whether I'll engage again.

No signature to see here, move along...

tccki

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#3457288 30-Jan-2026 15:41

I've just posted about a new service in https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=194&topicid=323892 for an Auckland-based VPS operated by Quic (Vetta)

Quic Fibre Internet - https://account.quic.nz/refer/74633 - free setup ($29 value) by using promo code at checkout: R74633EJQHUT