Tue 14 Sep 2004
Commoditised web hosting
Posted by Joe under At home and work , Random Thoughts , Web development and design[4] Comments
I’m happy with my current web host except fo one thing: storage space. I’ve been with them about 2 years. At the time I signed up their pricing was comparable to overseas and cheaper than a lot of NZ hosts. Their customer service is fantastic. On the odd occaision that I do have problems they are responsive and friendly. They are even nice when I am late paying the bill.
Unfortunately in New Zealand they do not appear to be alone in their pricing policies: most kiwi web hosts are similar prices.
Storage space is a commodity. Its price is so low that Google can give away a whole Gigabyte in exchange for a few ads. I know that there is added value that the web host provides, but the price should not double just because I go from 40MB to 80MB, especially since the overheads would be next to the same.
What I don’t get is that prices around the world for web hosting appear to have fallen dramatically, but not here. I can get the same (or very similar) type of hosting package but with more space for about US$7/month on a server in California, Texas or Canada compared to NZ$50/month for hosting here. I’d rather stay with a kiwi host, but it doesn’t make sense to.
Kiwis: what do you think?
Kiwi web hosting prices are outrageous. I’m with a US outfit: http://www.adthosting.com/. They have been good – there have been a few outages, but they are usually very responsive to my emails when I need them. The only benefit I could see with a NZ host is you could ring them up if worse comes to worse, but even then there’s no guarantee of a good response. So until kiw web hosts lower their prices, I see no reason not to use the much cheaper overseas services. Besides, most of my readers come from US or Europe anyway, so arguably the response times are quicker for them.
I’ve hosted myself for, over two years now (on the end of ADSL and now Cable). I have access to a machine on the use (where I have 8GB of disk space, and 100GB/month bandwidth for ~NZD$14/month, which I use for high traffic things (photos, static downloads etc). I much prefer the control of “owning” (or at least having root access to) the machines my site is hsoted on.
Thanks guys. I’m know enough about *nix to know that I don’t know enough to host/admin it myself. Also having only 1PC at home rules this out. Geek Hosting looks like a reasonable deal so I may go there. All will be revealed in the fullness of time…
Many so called ‘NZ Hosts’ just host there clients websites on US servers. If you are using a NZ Host, then make sure that they are using NZ servers. Although Kiwi Web Host, calls itself ‘Kiwi’, doing a traceroute on their site shows it is hosted in the USA.
Hosting your website on NZ servers is soooo much faster and quicker than US based server, if your NZ website is targeted towards NZ clients who are connected to the NZ network.
Also look for a web host that divides there services onto different servers, so email is handled on a different server from teh website, as are databases. This means if the website harddrive goes down, your email will still function etc. This is far more reliable than single server hosts, such as servers that use CPanel. I have used a lot of different hosts, and you do pay for what you get. Cheap hosting is usually hosted on servers that have low specs, and are overloaded with thousands of accounts, all on a single cpanel server.
Just my two cents on teh subject. I have had too many bad experiences with unreliable hosts, and prefer to pay more for reliability and on a decent network.