Secure Website Hosting

Super cheap hosting is cheap for a reason. 

You can get cheap hosting in India but if rankings, loading speed, performance, reliability, security or support mean anything to your business than you should forget about super cheap hosting. Ask yourself how important are your website and emails to the daily running of your business? Unless the answer is not really important at all - then you need an actual team here in New Zealand you can manage it for you. 

One trap for new players if they get a cheap hosting plan is caching. Basically it is your browser storing web information so that frequently visited sites load quicker. So Joe Bloggs with his $8 hosting plan in India who looks at his site everyday things it's loading super fast. But his customers who are visiting for the first time - are not.

The hosting server equipment affects the performance of your website

If your website is sitting on a crowded server which is struggling with bandwidth and memory your website will be slow to load. If you have an e-commerce site it might even fail to function during heavy usage times in these conditions. All websites have different usage requirements and we make sure these are met for each one of the sites we build.

When getting a website built it is so easy to get tunnel-vision on only the design and built aspect of the project. Once it is online, most people simply forget about any further details.

Before your new site goes live you should know:
• Where is your site hosted.
• Who is actually looking after it.
• How often is it backed up.
• Who is your domain registered with.
• Who is your domain registered to. (Hopefully you!)

Where and whom you host your website dictates the security of your site

If you have invested in a website and it becomes a critical part of your business then you should take an interest in where and how your website is hosted. Things can go wrong and the impact can be disasterous for a business. How much would it impact you right now if:

A) Your website went down. Is it backed up? How much would it affect your business if it couldn’t be revived?

B) Your emails stop working. Who can you contact to get them working asap?

C) Your domain has expired. Everything has stopped working. Where is your domain registered? 

D) That young IT guy who was looking after everything never returned from his snowboarding holiday.. Now what?

Security against cyber attacks is critical.

In November 2018 our previous data hosting facility was hit with a sustained and serious DDoS cyber attack which took out the network that our servers were using. This ended up causing one of our servers to be shut-down. We quickly started migrating our customers across to our other server. Soon that was shut-down as well.

We knew that our customers needed their sites back up ASAP, but with no time-frame for when our servers would come back online, we quickly made the decision to move. This meant preparing a new server in a different facility and migrating all our customers across. Doing this is no easy feat and was a costly and time consuming task. A process that would normally take us a couple of weeks we did in 48 hours straight. 

This is what managed hosting is; a team to deal with things like this for our customers. Moreover, this event caused us to totally re-think hosting in New Zealand. The truth is, NZ is grossly unprepared for todays level of cyber attacks. Our regional data centres are simply not robust enough. 

Our servers are now with AWS in Sydney. This facility is HUGE, it dwarfs NZ data-centres and comes with levels of protection not possible here. Sydney is close enough to have no impact on loading speeds and offers the best protection for our customers. We're with AWS alongside names like Netflix, Nasa, Air BnB, Expedia and Cathay Pacific.