IT-Lab is a privately-held New Zealand hosting company that dates back to 2012. Its servers sit in a data center in Aukland, and its unpolished website sells basic shared hosting and VPS solutions. Prices are displayed in New Zealand dollars.
Features and Ease of Use
IT-Lab sells only three Linux-based shared hosting plans that provide these features:
- 500 MB to 2,000 MB disk space
- 500 MB to 5,000 MB bandwidth
- 1 to 20 domains
- Debian 5 Linux operating system
- Apache 2.2 webserver
- MySQL 5.1
- PHP v5
- FTP access
- RoundCube and SquirrelMail
IT-Lab’s software infrastructure is based on the industry-standard Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) stack that allows complex database-backed websites to be created. However, the PHP v5 is somewhat outdated now that many hosts use the far faster PHP v7.
With a maximum of 2,000 MB storage and 5,000 MB monthly bandwidth, IT-Lab is very clear that it targets small website owners that don’t expect high traffic. However, you can benefit from up to ten MySQL databases to install up to ten CMS systems, which isn’t bad.
You also get up to 100 FTP accounts, email accounts, subdomains, email forwards, mailing lists, domain pointers, and auto-responders.
For more resources, consider opting for a VPS package over shared hosting. The four VPS packages offer storage ranging from 10 GB to 40 GB, RAM from 128 MB to 512 MB, and unlimited traffic.
This company can throttle bandwidth in the case of excessive consumption, and there is no uptime SLA.
Pricing and Support
Compared with other New Zealand hosts, IT-Lab’s hosting plans are a tad overpriced for the features on offer.
While you should be able to contact the customer support team by telephone, ticket, or email, I have to tell you that my exploratory email received no response. The self-support resources are as unimpressive as everything else, and are limited to just two frequently asked questions.
