With literally thousands of cheap web hosting providers around the world, why would you pay a premium for New Zealand web hosting? This article aims to show you why choosing a New Zealand based provider makes sense for your business.
Performance
New Zealand web hosting comes at a premium to offshore web hosting; however in turn it offers superior speed and performance for New Zealand based users compared to US based hosting, particularly if it is on the East Coast of the US or in Europe.
The geographic distance alone adds substantial latency; however you run the risk of slower performance and downtime as their overnight backups and maintenance windows will fall in the middle of your day rather than overnight when you and your users are less likely to notice it.
Downtime costs money
If your web site is down for 6 minutes, 6 hours or 6 days how would your business be affected? If not at all then going with the cheapest website hosting provider may not be a bad idea as there is no reason to pay a premium.
However if you rely on your website and email to operate your business, then paying a premium to a New Zealand based web hosting provider will help to ensure you have direct contact with a local company that can be held far more accountable than an offshore provider.
Not all web hosting is equal
Web Drive charges hundreds for it’s cloud servers, where as Open Host charges just $6.99 for web hosting. Clearly there is a difference beyond price! Generally with web hosting, the cheaper the product the less redundancy and support you can expect.
In the above example Web Drive provides hosting on a cluster of high end servers with a very high up-time guarantee and support agreements, where as Open Host provides a lower SLA and business hours support.
How to choose a web hosting provider?
- What service guarantees to they offer?
- Can you view any customer feedback? (e.g. Finda reviews, News articles, Forums, Twitter posts etc..)
- How long have the been in business?
And most importantly, how much would it cost you if they have extended downtime? If you only spend a few dollars a month on hosting, but downtime costs you hundreds of dollars per hour then you need to seriously reconsider your priorities!