Openhost.co.nz Review 2024 – Is It Worth It?

If there is a worse web hosting/domain registration company in NZ I pray I never meet them. We got stuck with them after they took over Webdrive and integrated it into their truly appalling control panel. We had several hundred domains transferred across and its been an ongoing nightmare transferring them away one at a time. Even after they are moved, they still keep sending out email reminders to clients until the "expiration" date. They are cheap, but they need to be as they are truly awful in every respect. You'd be nuts to use them when you can pay about $5 more a month to use someone competent. I'm not quite sure what their business model is, but it appears to involve buying up smaller better companies, stripping the customers out and forcing them into their awful system. Avoid, avoid, avoid

Mindtpi, New Zealand
March 03, 2021

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They used to be ok when they were locally owned and run could get help when you needed it but now since their buy out they are terrible stay away from them, I have had bad service and they are completely inflexible with a rude call center to make it worse. I'm moving all my clients away as soon as I can.

Brett, New Zealand
February 15, 2021

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Utterly useless. Worst web hosting you could imagine. Avoid. They transferred the site to a new server, deleted auto payment details, stopped the account, then told me to login and pay. Except they had changed my password on the transfer, so can't login. Have to sit on the phone again to sort out. Not the first this has happened. Unfortunately can't give no stars.

Rob King, New Zealand
September 19, 2020

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Been with webbase/webdrive/openhost since 2005 as a reseller with over 100 sites, specifically so I could get phone support. Since these companies combined and become one company - their service has become rubbish. No longer provide phone support everything done online to buy them time, when submitting a ticket takes 2 -3 days to get a response and due to the lack of knowledge in many of the front line support much time is wasted with to and froing simply because the first line of techs don't even know their server configurations. Openhost just migrated "webbase" to their openhost servers to provide improved service offerings to their clients. CRAP! - they no longer provided control panel access to clients of resellers. Their servers do not yet provide php 7.3. access - every other reseller we use provides this. When ever support is provided for support - the first response is " upgrade your site" - thats even to those who's websites are at the most current level of release. The techs have no understanding of CMS systems so if clients who are hosted with them ask a question re Wordpress or Joomla the answer is we are not webmasters so please contact someone else. Had enough of the piss poor service migrating my sites to another reseller who can provide service.

Henk Keyzer, New Zealand
July 29, 2020

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Avoid. And be advised that Webdrive has merged with Open Host. Same office address. Same operation. It all went well for so long. But I found more attractive technical stacks, so I decided to cancel my service after 12 years. They charge a month in advance, paid by DD without missing a single payment. When I emailed to cancel at the start of Feb, they said I had an invoice to pay and that I need to contact them when those are paid, only then could they cancel my account. First, effectively what they are saying here is "pay this invoice or we're going to create more". Which is absurd and I'm quite sure, illegal. You cannot refuse to cancel a service. Second (and most of my issue): It's just a terrible and lazy attitude to make customers jump through hoops (like watching their account for an outgoing Direct Debit for an outstanding bill) just to cancel a service. Third, the invoices were generated the day I canceled. So I asked how that works in terms of whether they are actually still valid since they are a month in advance. Not a big deal if they don't refund partial months. Their notification that I need to get back in touch after paying the invoice was sent a few hours after my notice to cancel. I got no reply to three requests over four days asking how to proceed in light of the above. Which I believe is intentionally stalling given past response times. In the end, I never got a reply, I had to call and ask them to respond. I was told over the phone that they require 30 days notice of cancellation and that there would be one pro-rata invoice left to pay next month. Fine and not unusual. I paid the final full invoice manually and awaited the final pro-rata invoice. Fast forward a month and they send me a full invoice again. I email them to remind them that I am expecting a pro-rata invoice for only one-two days service. Seven days later, I get a one line response saying that the full month invoice is due with no other information. When I replied stating that their own staff member told me a pro-rata invoice would be issued and I wasn't prepared to pay a full month's cost for 2 days service on that basis, I got a rather curt reply telling me to read their terms and conditions and failure to pay would result in debt collection. A threat to someone who has paid on time, without fail, for 12 years. I replied asking for clarification on why a staff member would tell me a pro-rata invoice would apply and I'm being told something different via email, I have had no response after 12 days. The most ridiculous part: this invoice is a grand total of twenty dollars. That's how desperate their business is. Milking a full month's billing for technically 2 days of service while ignoring customers for a measly $20. Trivial enough for me to pay, but for most companies, none of the pain above would be worth the time. And certainly not worth the poor reputation costing them multiple times that. Nor is it worth my time writing this. But I decided that their general attitude, abysmal communication and simply ignoring long-term customer merits costing them far more via warning others. Stay away from Web Drive/Open Host. Life is too short to deal with such frustratingly conflicting, disorganized and lazy people on the operations end. There's too much competition in the hosting market for such a poorly-managed company to survive longer than it has to.

Aaron Cooper, New Zealand
April 06, 2020

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