Every now and then we get contacted by website owners hosted by other web hosts, telling us that their website has gone offline and they can’t contact their web host. They are wanting us to urgently help them get their website and email back online. Their existing web hosts website maybe offline, and all attempts of contacting them have been extinguished by the website owner.  Mostly this seems to occur with web hosts catering for the bottom end of the NZ Web Hosting market.

When a web hosting company goes out of business, there is often no way to contact the web host, and all websites and email accounts they host, including their own website, may also be offline. Unless a website owner has a recent local copy of their website, potentially the website owner may have lost their website forever.

The problem is that web hosting in New Zealand is a very competitive market, so often web hosting businesses are very low margin businesses that require a constant inflow of new web hosting customers. The public demands lower and lower prices, and often the point of difference between web hosts, is the price they are prepared to sell their  web hosting to the public for. As a result it is often a ‘race to the bottom’ with many bottom of the market web hosts under cutting one another, and making smaller and smaller margins. So often these bottom of the market  companies can have poor support and reliability, and are potentially at a high risk of experiencing cash flow problems.  As the saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys’.

The Lounge Network is one of New Zealand’s longest established web hosting providers, and our business grade web hosting is a true NZ Business Grade Web Hosting. We position our service mid market, so we have a long term sustainable business model, with many many happy clients…it is the reason why we have been in business for over 12 years!

If you have been left high and dry by your previous NZ Web Host, we can help transfer you to one of our web hosting plans. We have true business grade web hosting and can cater a web hosting and email plan for that is suitable for most clients requirements.

To transfer your web hosting and domain names to our service, please email us, and we will personally email you back with details of what we need from you. Basically to transfer your website and domain to us,  you will first need your .nz domains UDAI code (pronounced You Dye), so you can transfer your domain name across into our NZ Domain Manager system. You can get your UDAI code from your existing web host or domain provider. Many web hosts are reseller domain providers, so if you are unable to contact them directly for your UDAI, you can instead contact the Official Domain Registrar for your UDAI. You can find the contact details of your Registrar by using our NZ Whois Tool. The registrar will be the company at the top of the whois report.  The UDAI must be provided by the registrar within a timely manner, and usually the UDAI is emailed. However if the email address they have on record is down, due to your web hosting being down, it could create problems obtaining your UDAI. In that case you will need to contact the domain registrar as to what their process is to get this changed. If you are still having trouble obtaining your domains UDAI, please contact the NZ Domain Name Commissioner.

Next you will need to signup to our web hosting services. We will help you with this, and will explain what you need to do. Once signed up, we will send you an account, and once paid, your new web hosting details will be emailed to you. You will then be able to setup email accounts and upload your website, and we will switch your domains setting onto your new hosting account. Please note that if you don’t have a copy of your website, or a local backup, then you won’t be able to restore your existing website. If you find yourself in this position, you should try to contact your old web host and see if they can provide this to you.  You should also contact your web designer, if you had it professionally setup for you, as they may have a local copy. If no one has a copy, then unfortunately you may have lost your website. For setting up a new website, we recommend using free software such as WordPress.