It also gives you total independance - if you have your own domain name then you are able to move your supplier at any time, if you don't then you are basically stuck with the supplier you have, no matter how much they charge and how bad their service is.

Every site on the Internet has a domain name, so you either use your own (such as yourcompany.com or yourcompany.co.nz) or someone elses (such as yourcompany.isp or isp/yourcompany, where "isp" is the name of your Internet Service Providor or Web Host, such as xtra.co.nz, voyager.co.nz, ihug.co.nz, nzhost.com etc).

Similarly, your email address can either be totally your own (such as paulm@yourcompany.com) or it becomes part of your ISP's (such as paulm@xtra.co.nz, paulm@voyager.co.nz, paulm@ihug.co.nz etc)

From this you will see why your own domain gives you the independance - if you have your own domain name then you can move to any other supplier at any time.

If you are using your ISP's domain as part of your address, then to move would mean that your Internet address and email address would both have to change - as bad for business as changing your phone number or mail address without any form of redirection on either, and extremely expensive both in terms of changing all your stationery and cards etc, and also in potential lost business and lost goodwill.

And what happens if your ISP goes bankrupt or decides to go out of the business of being an ISP because its not profitable enough for them? Provided you have your own domain name its no problem, you'll only miss a day or two whilst you change to another supplier.

Without your own domain name, anyone accessing your site for evermore will get an error message, and no-one will be able to send email to your email address again - ever!

We can host any domain name, New Zealand, American, or any other, its your choice.

However, if you are getting either an International (i.e. American) or New Zealand domain name, then we look after all this for you - just enter your desired domain name when you fill in the order form, with an alternative or two. We will check the availability, and if the name you want is not available we will come back with some alternatives.

Alternatively, if you wish to check this yourself, you can do so by going to http://rs.internic.net to check International domains, http://www.domainz.net.nz/service/checking.html for New Zealand ones.

When you are ready, let us know and we will arrange it all for you. To move a New Zealand domain we need the "Domain Registration Key" originally given to you by Domainz, if an American one then the request for the move must come from the email address of the owner or technical contact. We will guide you through this process.

Once the domain move is done, it will take from 1 to 4 days for the Domain Name Servers worldwide to update their cache to work to the new IP address. This will happen at different times for users of different providers.

Therefore, it is a good idea to ensure that your old account is running for a week or so after the domain move, so that those users whose Domain Name Servers are slow at updating can still reach your site at the old IP address.

Please note that with virtually all foreign registries you need to have the DNS service working for the domain before you may register it. This means that you must set-up your domain name account with us before you go on to register it.