Can you give us a brief overview of SiteHost as a company?
My brother and I founded SiteHost in 2004, and today we’re the largest New Zealand-owned hosting company. We are developer-focused, which you see in our products’ design and in the technical nous of our Support Team, and we’re comfortable all the way up to enterprise-level hosting. We invest in fast and modern hardware that we operate out of multiple locations around the world. The largest is a data centre that we own and operate in Auckland, New Zealand. Our expert team provides a level of service that’s hard to find elsewhere. The best customer relationships strengthen over time. We work hard to earn and keep people’s trust, and that turns into long-standing connections.What is GPU hosting, and how does it work?
Think of a Dedicated Server—a whole machine that’s all yours, unshared, built the way you want, and sitting in our data center. Now add in massive amounts of computing power courtesy of NVIDIA GPUs, and that’s GPU Hosting. We saw the need for GPU Hosting when our own internal work on AI-powered tools hit a tipping point. After the proof-of-concept stage, third-party models get harder to justify. Do you really want to upload reams of sensitive data to an external provider? Can you predict what training and inference will cost on their pay-as-you-go billing? If you have a security or safety concern, is their SLA responsive enough? To protect our IP and avoid blowing budgets, we started self-hosting GPUs. Since we can do this at a steady cost, we knew it would be useful for other businesses, so we introduced GPU Hosting as a product in 2023. There are a few example builds on our website, but we’re quite flexible with the GPUs and other hardware that we’ll assemble. It all comes back to the models that customers want to run, and other needs. In every case, there’s no queuing behind other users, no tokenized billing, and none of the complexity of stitching together hyperscale cloud services. You know where your data is, too. All of this makes AI simpler to work with.What makes private cloud a unique service, and what benefits does it offer to enterprise-level clients?
Every Private Cloud is different, which is what makes them so useful. Depending on what a Private Cloud user wants, we’ll customize infrastructure, including networking, firewalls, architecture, and hardware. Underneath every Private Cloud is at least one Dedicated Server, which we’ll build to your requirements and manage for you. On top of that is a virtualization layer that lets you create, manage, and delete servers however you like. Those can include Cloud Container servers, which introduce all sorts of flexibility, or more typical virtual machines. This is where the possibilities of a Private Cloud really multiply. Like GPU Hosting, Private Clouds carry a fixed cost. If you’ve ever operated in a hyperscale cloud environment you’ve probably experienced bill shock from a service that never terminated properly, or a small architectural quirk that grew into a big one without you noticing. We make those risks go away.What other services and features do you offer?
Our Cloud Containers platform definitely tops this list. We launched it in 2016 and have kept improving it ever since. Today, it sits on top of your choice of standard or high-performance hardware. You spin up a server, any size you want, then start adding containers. There are dozens of pre-built images for common development environments, or you can bring your own images. Platform features include cloning and syncing containers, or sharing files between them. The overall idea is to make it easy to run multiple environments and to give developers tools that improve productivity. For developers who want more control over their hosting we have High Performance Virtual Servers running Linux or Windows, or standard Linux VMs. Our Dedicated Servers put an entire physical machine at your service, or our Virtual Dedicated Servers combine the best of both worlds—the performance of dedicated hardware at virtualized prices. We’re always up for a chat about bespoke hosting as well. Not every business can fit into a pre-assembled box, and it’s actually fun to learn what people are looking for and solve their technical headaches.What is the most important thing to consider when choosing a hosting provider in 2025, and why should our readers consider and choose SiteHost?
There are two major things to think about. Start with hardware, and what you’re actually getting for your money. The difference between a modern CPU and something four or five years old can make a huge difference to computing performance. I can’t believe the age of some of the equipment that very well-known hosting brands are still selling. Quite often, the most cost-effective way to optimize performance is to upgrade your hardware. Chips are cheaper than labor, right? So, before you invest in days of developer time, look at your hosting infrastructure. Secondly, there’s trust. This hasn’t changed in the 20-plus years that I’ve run SiteHost. As a customer, you want to know for sure that your infrastructure is professionally monitored and maintained and that outages will be as rare and as short as possible. You need a Support Team that will answer questions accurately and fast, and who can solve issues quickly. This is why we operate a fully in-house Support Team. No outsourcing. We also always have an engineer available.How do you view the broader cloud hosting industry today?
The shine has come off the hyperscale cloud like AWS and Azure. Obviously, they’re some of the biggest companies in the world, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But these days, they’re not really competing for the same customers as us. They’re trading on reputation, and we’re winning business from developers who can see through that. Think of it this way: AWS is around 20 years old. In that time, the CPUs in our Dedicated Servers have gotten 100x faster and no more expensive. A lot of those gains have come in the last four years or so. You see the returns on all that innovation with every dollar you spend to directly access hardware. There’s no way that AWS has gotten 100x faster or cheaper over two decades. There’s a ‘cloud exit’ going on, where businesses are leaving cloud services behind and rediscovering servers. Why wouldn’t you, when it’s easier, cheaper, and faster? High cloud bills are the push, and ever more cost-effective hardware is the pull. It’s a good time to be a hosting provider that invests in modern hardware and passes on the value of innovation to customers.To learn more about SiteHost, you can visit sitehost.nz
