FAQ
These are the real hesitations that stop someone getting in touch. We'd rather answer them here than have you wonder — starting with the one nobody asks a small provider to their face.
Before you get in touch
Your domain is registered in your name. Your hosting account is in your name. Every credential is handed over on request, without a conversation about it.
We deliberately build on standard PHP, standard MySQL and standard WordPress, so any competent New Zealand developer can pick up your site without needing us to explain it. If you leave, you get a full working copy of everything — files, database and mail.
Primal Media Limited has traded continuously since 2003, and that's worth something. But you shouldn't have to take it on faith, so we've removed the risk rather than asked you to accept it.
Almost certainly not. A single brochure site on the $25 Starter plan is a normal client for us, and a good share of our week is half-hour jobs for people who just want someone to ring.
What doesn't work well is a sub-hour job that needs a full quote, briefing and invoice cycle — the paperwork ends up costing more than the work. That's exactly why the Business and Managed plans include monthly dev time: it means a five-minute change is a five-minute change, not a purchase order.
Quotes are fixed against a written list of work, not estimates that drift. Anything outside that list is quoted separately before it's started, at a stated hourly rate, and nothing is billed that you haven't agreed to in writing.
Discovery does occasionally turn up something genuinely unexpected — an undocumented integration, a database in worse shape than the site suggested. When it does, you hear about it the day we find it, with options and prices, rather than on the invoice. That's the honest version: we can promise no surprise billing, not that there will never be a surprise.
You don't need to understand DNS, PHP versions or object caching to be a good client. Our job is to explain what's happening in terms of what it costs you and what it changes, then make a recommendation you can act on.
Not knowing how something works isn't the same as not being able to decide about it. If we ever explain something in a way that leaves you more confused than when you started, say so and we'll explain it differently. Nobody here thinks less of a client for asking.
Yes — and it's one of the most common calls we get, so please don't feel awkward about it.
There's usually a way through even with no logins at all. The key is normally the domain registration: if the domain is registered to you or your company, we can rebuild DNS and mail from the registrar side without the previous developer's cooperation. If it's registered to them, there are established processes for that too, and we've been through them many times.
Mention it early in the conversation rather than late — it changes the order we do things in.
Because a free consultation is a sales call, and you'd be able to tell.
To tell you anything worth acting on, we have to actually look at your system — the server, the site, the logs. That's a couple of hours of a developer's time. What you get back is a written recommendation: what's wrong, what it would take to fix, and what it costs.
That document is yours. If you take it to another developer, it'll still be useful to them. You get the findings whether or not you hire us, which is something a free sales call can't offer. The full process is here.
No. Hosting is billed monthly on a GST invoice, with no setup fee and no lock-in term. Move up or down a plan as your site changes, and cancel with a month's notice.
If you do cancel, you get a full working copy of your files, database and mail. We'd rather keep clients because leaving is easy and they choose not to.
About the hosting
Two reasons: speed and sovereignty.
Speed. Every request from a New Zealand visitor to an offshore server has to cross the Tasman or the Pacific and come back again. Sydney adds roughly 25–30 milliseconds per round trip; a server in the United States is closer to 150. A modern web page makes dozens of those round trips before it finishes loading, so the delay compounds into whole seconds of waiting. Served from Auckland, the same page starts arriving in single-digit milliseconds — which visitors feel, and which search engines measure.
Sovereignty. Your files, databases and backups sit on New Zealand soil, under New Zealand law and the Privacy Act 2020. Data held overseas is also subject to the laws of the country it happens to sit in, which can mean foreign access requests and a much muddier path if you ever need to get it back. If you hold customer names, addresses, order histories or enquiry form submissions, that distinction is worth caring about.
There is a plainer benefit too: when something goes wrong you are dealing with a New Zealand company in your own time zone, invoiced in New Zealand dollars with GST, not a support queue that wakes up after you have gone to bed.
New Zealand reaches the rest of the world through a small number of submarine cables. When one is cut, congested or taken down for maintenance, traffic to and from overseas gets slow, unreliable, or stops altogether.
If your website is hosted in Sydney, Singapore or Oregon, that is the moment your New Zealand customers cannot reach it — even though your business is fine, their internet is fine, and the server itself is running perfectly. The site is up; it just is not reachable from here.
Because KiwiHost NZ servers are in Auckland, traffic from your New Zealand visitors never leaves the country. It goes from their ISP, across domestic infrastructure, to your site. Your backups stay onshore as well, so a restore does not depend on an international link either.
One honest caveat: anything on your site that calls out to an overseas service — an offshore payment gateway, fonts or scripts loaded from a foreign CDN, a mail service hosted abroad — can still be affected. On the sites we manage we keep those dependencies to a minimum and serve fonts and scripts locally wherever we can. Overseas visitors would also still be affected, but for most New Zealand businesses the customers who matter are the ones on this side of the cable.
With ordinary budget hosting, the host rents you space on a server and everything above that is your problem — updates, security, backups, certificates, the lot. Managed hosting means running the website is our job, not yours. In practice that covers:
What it is not is a blank cheque for development work. The Business and Managed plans include dev support each month (30 minutes and 2 hours respectively) for small changes — a price update, a new staff photo, a form tweak. Larger jobs like a redesign, a new feature or a new set of pages are quoted separately.
Packages run from $25 to $120 per month plus GST, and the honest way to choose is by what your site does rather than by storage numbers you can't self-assess.
Starter ($25) suits a brochure or portfolio site: one NZ-hosted website, 5 GB of SSD storage, daily offsite backups, free SSL and email support in NZ hours. Business ($55) suits a small store or several sites under one owner: up to five websites, 25 GB storage, 30-day backup retention, caching, phone and email support, and 30 minutes of dev support each month. Managed ($120) suits a site that earns money and can't be down: updates handled for you, priority same-day response, uptime monitoring and two hours of dev support monthly.
Above that, VPS and custom stacks start around $180 +GST and are quoted to the workload rather than sold as a tier — high-traffic WooCommerce, pinned PHP versions, staging environments, anything with a queue that matters.
Everything is billed monthly in New Zealand dollars on a GST invoice, with no setup fee and no lock-in. Costs that sit outside the hosting fee are domain registration, any paid third-party licences your site uses, and development work beyond your plan's included time.
Yes — and we do the moving, not you. A typical migration runs like this:
Most small business sites are done within a couple of business days, and most of that time is testing rather than copying. WordPress and WooCommerce, plain PHP applications and static sites are all routine for us.
What we need from you is access to your current hosting — a control panel login, or FTP and database details — and the ability to change your domain's DNS records. If you have lost access to an old host or an old developer has gone quiet, say so early; that situation is common and there is usually a way through it.