Search “web hosting NZ” and you’ll get a wall of plans with names like Starter, Pro and Ultimate, each listing storage, bandwidth and “unlimited” things you’ve never needed. Most small business owners pick one on price, then find out a year later what it didn’t include. Here’s what actually matters for a typical brochure site, and what you can safely ignore.
What hosting actually is
Your website is a set of files (and, for WordPress, a database) sitting on a computer that’s always on and always online. Hosting is renting space on that computer. Your domain name is a separate thing: it’s the address that points people to it. You can choose a domain with one company and host with another, and plenty of businesses do.
What a small business site really needs
For a five-to-ten page site for a tradie, café or local practice, the list is short:
- Speed. Pages should load in a second or two on a phone. Slow sites lose visitors and rank worse on Google.
- HTTPS. The padlock in the address bar. Without it, browsers warn visitors the site isn’t secure. Any decent host includes a free certificate and renews it for you.
- Backups you can actually restore. Regular, automatic, kept somewhere other than the site itself. Ask how a restore works and who does it.
- Uptime monitoring. Someone (or something) noticing when the site goes down, ideally before your customers do.
- A real person to ask. When something breaks, “submit a ticket and wait” is a different experience from someone who already knows your site.
What you can mostly ignore: storage and bandwidth limits. A small business site uses a tiny fraction of even the cheapest plan’s allowance. “Unlimited” is a sales word, not a feature you’ll notice.
Do your servers need to be in New Zealand?
Less than you’d think. Modern hosts serve your pages from a network of locations close to whoever is visiting, so a site hosted overseas can load just as fast in Nelson as one on a server in Auckland. Where it can matter is if you handle sensitive customer data and have obligations about where it’s stored. For a brochure site with a contact form, speed and reliability count for more than the server’s postcode.
Shared, WordPress or managed hosting?
These are the three types you’ll see most often.
Shared hosting
The cheapest option. Your site shares a server with hundreds of others, and you get a control panel to manage it yourself. Fine if you’re comfortable with that, but everything is your job: setup, updates, backups, fixing it when it breaks.
WordPress hosting
Shared or dedicated hosting tuned for WordPress, often with one-click installs and automatic WordPress updates. The catch is in “WordPress updates”. Many plans update WordPress itself but leave the plugins and theme to you, and out-of-date plugins are one of the most common ways small sites get hacked. Our website security checklist covers why that matters.
Managed hosting
Someone else handles the technical side: setup, DNS, HTTPS, updates, backups and monitoring. You pay a bit more than bare shared hosting and stop thinking about it. For most small businesses this is the right fit, because the cheapest option stops being cheap the first time something goes wrong and you’re paying someone by the hour to fix it.
What it costs
For a typical small business site, expect roughly $10–$40 a month for hosting, plus $20–$40 a year for a .co.nz domain. Our website cost guide puts that alongside the cost of the build. If you’re paying well over that for a simple brochure site, it’s worth asking what the extra is buying.
Watch for:
- Introductory pricing. A cheap first year that renews at double or triple. Check the renewal price, not the headline.
- Backups as an add-on. Some plans charge extra for backups or only keep a few days’ worth.
- Prices quoted excluding GST. Easy to miss when comparing plans side by side.
- Annual lock-in with no easy exit. Find out how you’d move your site elsewhere, and whether you own everything on it. We’ve written about whether you really own your website.
Email hosting is a separate decision
Hosting your website and hosting your email aren’t the same thing, and they don’t need to be with the same company. Many web hosts bundle a basic mailbox, but a dedicated email provider is usually more reliable and easier to use on your phone. If you’re weighing up a proper you@yourbusiness.co.nz address, see whether a business email is worth it. A cheap middle ground is a forwarding address: mail sent to your domain lands in the inbox you already use.
Questions to ask any host
Before you sign up, get straight answers to these:
- What’s the renewal price, including GST?
- How often are backups taken, how long are they kept, and who restores them?
- Who updates WordPress, plugins and themes, if the site runs on WordPress?
- Is HTTPS included and renewed automatically?
- If I leave, how do I get my site and domain back?
A good host answers all five without hedging.
How we do it
Our Bare Hosting plan is managed website hosting for NZ small businesses that edit their own content: hosting, DNS, HTTPS, backups, uptime monitoring and a forwarding address, all handled. If you’d rather not touch the site at all, the Site Care Plan adds content updates. Compare the plans side by side.
Whoever you go with, the best hosting is the kind you never have to think about. Pick on what’s included and what happens when something breaks, not on the headline price.