[thelist] New Zealand hosts

[Andrew Forsberg]

>Hi all,

Hey!

>I was hoping there may be some NZers on the list
>who could give me some advice re hosts.

Sure. Sorry for the lateness of the reply, I don't read all the 
posts, and only chanced on this one when searching for something 
completely different.

Paradise.net.nz are excellent. The environment is PHP (4.0.4pl1) / 
MySQL (3.23.22-beta) / Debian Linux (2.2.17 kernel) / Apache 
(1.3.17). You can use perl (5.6, from memory), but they require 
scripts to be approved by an admin before they're installed in 
cgi-bin/ -- which is a bit of a nuisance, and something I've never 
bothered with.

90% of the time when you phone them with a problem (24x7), you get an 
adult on the other end who actually knows what they're doing. By NZ 
standards that's close on miraculous service.

They're fairly smart about fixing stuff up for you, and are happy to 
install most things on their servers if you need it (phpMyAdmin / 
webalizer, etc). The only real wall I banged my head against is that 
they haven't, and won't, recompile php with GD support. The admins 
feel this would slow down all the other sites they host. Well, you 
can't have everything, and for $50 (NZD, incl GST) / 28 days, it's 
fairly cheap. They don't charge anything if you want extra 
sub-domains, or if you want to use an ssl certificate with a 
subdomain.

At the very least you need to get off ihug. Their admins don't even 
bother with basic security precautions like turning off automatic 
folder indexing. Last time I tried it was fairly easy to get public 
ftp access (read only, but even so) to ihug's hosting directories. 
Let's just say I was scared by their obvious incompetence. I'd steer 
clear of Clear as well, they were awful to deal with (took me six 
months to CLOSE an account with them for god's sake). I've not done 
any business with Telecom, fwiw: I think they're MS based.

Feel free to ask for anything more specific,
Andrew
-- 
Andrew Forsberg
---
the pander - http://thepander.co.nz/
uberNET - http://uber.net.nz/