Web host gets new owner

By ADAM GIFFORD

Internet service company Iconz has bought New Plymouth-based website hosting company WebFarm and its associated domain-name registration business, FreeParking, for an undisclosed price.

WebFarm director Craig St George said the two companies had spent more than a year discussing ways to work together, in response to customer requests for more complete solutions.

"It's an acquisition, but we think of it more as a merger," St George said.

"Our customers can now get internet access from Iconz, and they have a great data centre."

He said some WebFarm sites, which were currently hosted in data centres in the United States, could be brought back to New Zealand.

Iconz has its own hosting service, Intellihost, which is aimed at web designers.

Iconz general manager Sean Weekes said there would be no changes to WebFarm or FreeParking, which has eight staff including St George and co-founder Richard Shearer.

The companies are developing a package for small and medium-sized businesses and individuals.

It will include a menu of services from domain registration and hosting to data backup and spam filtering.

WebFarm was started in 1997 by St George and Shearer on their return to New Plymouth after working overseas in the oil industry.

"We were doing software systems engineering, control systems, which is all automation," St George said.

"We saw this web stuff and thought, 'We can automate that'."

The FreeParking service was launched in 2000 and now manages about 30,000 names and processes 30 per cent of new ".nz" domain registrations.

Iconz, as The Internet Company of New Zealand, was one of the first commercial internet providers.

During the dotcom era it was owned by Asia Online, which went belly up in October 2001.

It was bought by a company owned by Peter Spencer. His Dresden Equities business had made a foray into the internet in 1999 with the establishment of low-cost internet provider EzySurf and Esurf Wireless, which offered all-you-can-eat wireless internet access to the business market.

Under chief executive Michael Spencer, Peter Spencer's son, the renamed Iconz has continued to pursue the corporate sector, increasing the number of business customers from 3000 to about 3800.

Weekes said it had increased its residential-customer base from about 17,000 two years ago to about 45,000, including about 20,000 who signed on to the "virtual ISP" it runs for TVNZ website NZoom.

"Both companies are New Zealand owned and operated and profitable," Weekes said. "By joining forces the potential for growth is even stronger."