Freeparking’s long goodbye ends with a Crazy move

Freeparking was once a New Zealand-owned success story. That ended in 2020, when the company was acquired by American giant Dreamscape. Now, five years later, the brand is set to disappear. In September, Freeparking's customers will be moved to Dreamscape's mothership, Crazy Domains.

Those customers have good reason to feel a bit nervous about the change that is about to hit them. The history of Crazy Domains tightening its hold over Freeparking customers is not a happy one. More than that, it sounds like the upcoming migration will shift their web hosting off New Zealand soil.

Freeparking since 2020

Anyone who's been with Freeparking for six or more years will have felt the difference that an international acquisition makes. Before 2020 their hosting provider had a stake in the same local tech scene, where reputation really matters. Now, they're one of countless little customers around the world, sitting an ocean away from HQ.

Scale changes the nature of technical migrations, when your hosting provider shifts customer accounts and data between systems. These projects are always complex, and anything that risks website uptime is always a high stakes project. Perfection is impossible and mistakes are magnified. Ideally every move would be made with extreme care and customers would have access to a Support Team on high alert.

Freeparking's recent record is not encouraging. 2022 saw their customers migrated onto Crazy Domains’ hosting and domain management platform. It's fair enough that an international company didn’t want a separate system just for New Zealand. But when some of those customers couldn't log in, or had their websites fall offline due to DNS problems, they had to take their usual place at the back of a long Support queue. A massive proportion of Dreamscape's kiwi customers were affected, but not enough people to be a big priority.

Then in 2023 customers at Freeparking and Discount Domains (which has the same owner) were hit by nameserver issues that brought down their websites and their access to domain management tools. Ironically, customers couldn’t even get the authorisation codes they would need to transfer their domains elsewhere. This was an NZ-only fault, so our best guess is that Dreamscape were moving off systems that were based here. A number of New Zealand businesses lost a trading day or more while they waited for help.

Migrations are hard and problems happen. Perhaps technical issues were inevitable in these two cases. But when issues aren't solved fast, or when a few hundred or thousand website issues in New Zealand aren't enough to put a provider's team on a more proactive footing, that's a big downside to international mergers.

What’s coming up in September

This time around, Crazy Domains says that “Your Freeparking account and services will be smoothly transferred over to Crazy Domains…Don’t worry—everything you have now, like your domains, website builder, and hosting, will remain up and running throughout the move.”

Make no mistake, this is another migration. A smooth move will be the intention, but the track record from 2022 and 2023 doesn't leave us with a lot of confidence.

Crazy Domains stores customer data overseas

Crazy Domains announced the end of Freeparking over the weekend, so it’s still fresh news and there are some details we don’t know. One thing that seems safe to assume is that this migration will move data out of New Zealand.

Freeparking has long offered Web Hosting on New Zealand-based servers. Crazy Domains isn't committed enough to actually host websites here. If Web Hosting is being migrated from Freeparking to Crazy Domains, that sounds a lot like the end of local data storage.

Even if genuinely local providers like us are becoming rarer, there are things that you can't get from anyone else.

In all the explanation and information that we’ve seen from Crazy Domains, it’s striking that they are silent about where their customer’s data is going to end up.

Staying local in New Zealand’s shrinking web hosting market

However well or poorly the migration goes, next month will mark the end of a once-major player in New Zealand’s web hosting industry.

When Dreamscape took over Freeparking in 2020, the international behemoth was on a shopping spree that pulled a lot of local brands into their tent. Almost overnight, we went from being one of a number of kiwi-owned hosting providers to the largest one left. It was a strange way to get to the top of the podium.

Even as genuinely local providers like us become rarer, there are things that you can't get from anyone else. Reasons to host on servers in New Zealand include speed, service, and data sovereignty. Local support is genuinely different, too.

Our overseas competitors understand the lure of true kiwi options, which is why a lot of them dress up as locals even when they’re not.

Migrating on your own terms

If you have Web Hosting that's about to be shifted off Freeparking's servers and into a new account, now is the perfect time to assess your options. You have to move, but you don't have to move to Crazy Domains.

By leaving Freeparking before September 22 you can take control of your website migration and pick an outcome that works for you. You'll also pull yourself out of Crazy Domains' big migration project and give yourself more control.

If kiwi customer service or local servers are important to you, or if you just want a second opinion from a hosting expert here in New Zealand, we're always up for an open conversation.

MyHost: New Zealand’s local Web Hosting choice

Let us be really clear about this: MyHost is a proudly New Zealand company, and we plan to stay that way. Our founders have been in this business for more than two decades, and they’re still as committed as ever. We have our own data centre in Auckland, and we have a fully in-house Support Team, with no outsourcing.

Our customers notice the difference that this makes. On Trustpilot, where our current overall score is 4.8, our top mentions include "customer service", "response time", and "contact". Ratings and reviews like these tell the story of a company that genuinely cares, and works hard to keep customers happy. After we learned from experience that 24/7 support is better when it comes from people who don’t work regular night shifts, we arranged for some support to come from people in different time zones. Even then, everyone is a full team member.

If you’re a Freeparking customer wondering whether you really want to be swept up in a wholesale move to Crazy Domains, now is the time to compare Freeparking, and Crazy Domains, to MyHost. Or, if you know you want to stay local, you can get started on our Web Hosting today.