Web Hosting - rented computers

Your web site exists in two places
  1. On a designer's or webmaster's computer for editing
  2. On the World Wide Web for people to browse

Web hosting is about case 2 - paying to be on the web.

Your web host has computers that can hold your files and they also can receive requests for files and deliver them. Web sites of the size you are contemplating will be tiny (10 Mb or less) and the traffic is likely to be tiny as well.

You should also want to have a host that supplies web statistics. That is, you can view the traffic with a program such as Webalizer that tells you how many pages were visited by different people, at what time of day, the country of origin etc.

The good news is - that's the cheap end of the market.

As the owner of the site, you pay a yearly rent for computer space and message traffic. The cost will be about $60 per year unless you are into complications such as needing multiple domain names all pointing to your site. (Such as www.megasmall.co.nz,  www.megasmall.com.au and www.megasmall.com)

Listed below are NZ based firms. US based ones used to be much cheaper, but NZ firms are now competitive. I see no reason for a web site to cost over $200 pa for hosting plus multiple domain names, substantial traffic and fast local servers. (If you want to stream video or sound then that's expensive.) For a simple site, aim to pay under $100.

I cannot recommend any particular host.  I did find one useful NZ guide on the net. See Kiwi Web Hosting reviews. Listed below are some I found browsing. Please bear in mind that higher prices may well arise because the firm is simply not well set up to do web hosting. They may be doing say domain name registration and contract out the hosting.

Kiwi Web Hosting has a good FAQ page to brief you on topics. For instance, if you want several domain names pointing to your site, it talks about 'parked domains'. For small sites, any of the first 5 are likely to be fine. Costs will be higher for more traffic and web addresses. Pick a company that has existed for over 2 years.

If you are looking at overseas hosts, first go through one of the review sites (via Google for "web hosting reviews"). That way you avoid fake sites posing as a US based major player.

Costs are $NZ per year including gst. 
(Cost of cheapest plan for 10 Mb or more, as of mid 2009)

Cost Company
  52 Hamster Host
  53 Web Hosting NZ
  58 Kiwi Web Hosting
  69 Jet Host
  80 Kiwi Hosting .Net
  94 Web Hosting New Zealand
  94 Open Host
100    Ramsu
$135 is the same as $10 /month plus GST

Hosting providers have a variety of plans, and upgrades should be easy.
You can readily swap hosts. It supposedly takes a day to take effect world-wide, but I have seen it effective within an hour.

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