Standing up a virtual private cloud in New Zealand has usually meant picking which compromise you can live with. Go to a hyperscaler and you get speed, but also a console with a thousand knobs, a bill you can’t forecast, and data that may hop offshore the moment you stop watching. Go local and traditional, and you get sovereignty and a real person on the phone — after a quote, a provisioning queue, and a few days’ wait.
We didn’t think that trade-off should still exist. So we built ASI Cloud Self-Service : a portal where you deploy a 100% NZ-hosted VPC in minutes, on flat monthly pricing, with full data sovereignty and Kiwi support behind it. It’s live now.
What ASI Cloud Self-Service is
ASI Cloud Self-Service is a self-service portal for spinning up and running Linux virtual machines on ASI’s own New Zealand cloud — the sovereign platform we’ve run for Kiwi organisations, councils, and schools for years, now with sign-up-and-go access.
You register an organisation, add a payment method, pick a VM template, choose your vCPU and RAM, and deploy. The whole path from a cold sign-up to a running VM fits inside one sitting. No sales call, no provisioning ticket, no waiting for someone to rack capacity. And before you commit to anything, the portal shows a live cost estimate, so the number you see at deploy is the number you pay.
Entry pricing starts at $35 NZD a month with no overages — flat, monthly, and predictable. For equivalent workloads, that lands at up to half the cost of running the same thing on AWS, Azure, or GCP, without the surprise egress and per-API charges that make hyperscaler bills so hard to forecast. If you want to check the maths against your own workloads, the cloud cost comparison tool does it line by line.
Kiwi teams have been told they can have cloud that’s fast, affordable, or sovereign — pick two. We built ASI Cloud Self-Service so they don’t have to choose. You’re a few clicks from a running VM, the price is flat and predictable, and the data never leaves New Zealand.
How it changes the day-to-day
The old way and the new way, side by side:
|
What you care about |
Hyperscaler or DIY |
ASI Cloud Self-Service |
|---|---|---|
|
Time to a running VM |
Hours of console setup, or days in a quote-and-provision queue |
Minutes, from a guided workflow |
|
The monthly bill |
Variable, with egress and per-API surprises |
Flat monthly rate, no overages, live estimate before deploy |
|
Where the data lives |
A local region, but offshore routing is easy to trigger |
100% NZ-hosted, across North and South Island data centres |
|
Who picks up the phone |
A ticket queue, a time zone away |
24/7 local Kiwi support |
What you can do from the portal
ASI Cloud Self-Service is built to keep you out of support tickets for the things you should be able to do yourself.
- Launch from templates. Start a Linux VM from a curated template with the cost shown upfront — no blank-canvas guesswork about sizing.
- Scale on demand. Change vCPU and memory, power VMs on and off, and rename them yourself. The resources you’re paying for follow the work, not a procurement cycle.
- Snapshot and roll back. Take point-in-time snapshots — up to three per VM — and roll back when an experiment goes sideways. Useful before a risky deploy, essential during one.
- Watch performance. Built-in CPU, memory, and IOPS metrics over flexible time ranges, so you can see what a VM is actually doing before you resize it.
- Manage access properly. Generate Ed25519 SSH keys in the portal for secure Linux access, rather than emailing keys around.
- Bill without surprises. Monthly breakdowns by resource, forecasts, and an Excel export — the kind of detail finance asks for and IT usually can’t produce on demand.
Built for humans, ready for AI agents
The portal is the front door, but it isn’t the only one. Every organisation can mint API tokens for secure programmatic access, so the same VMs you click into existence can be driven by scripts and CI pipelines. API-first automation for agents and integration partners is on the roadmap — the design intent is a platform a person runs by hand today and an agent orchestrates tomorrow, without changing where the workload lives or who holds the data.
That matters more than it used to. As teams hand more provisioning to automation and to AI agents, the question of *where that compute runs* gets louder, not quieter. Self-service NZ infrastructure means an agent spinning up a VM at 2am is still spinning it up inside New Zealand, under your organisation’s account, on a sovereign platform.
Where it runs — and why that matters
Every VM runs on ASI’s own infrastructure across the North and South Islands, in renewable-powered data centres, with no offshore routing. For NZ organisations carrying Privacy Act 2020 or NZISM obligations, that’s the difference between a local cloud *region* operated by a global provider and a contractual, auditable footprint with a named New Zealand operator. When a CISO has to evidence where data sits, “on a sovereign NZ platform run by ASI” is a far easier sentence to write.
Behind the self-service portal is the same operation we’ve run since 1985 — privately owned, NZ-based, with real engineers on local support around the clock. Self-service doesn’t mean you’re on your own.
Who it’s for
ASI Cloud Self-Service is built for teams that want cloud speed without the cloud tax — in money, in complexity, or in lost sovereignty:
- Kiwi SMEs who need a couple of reliable VMs without standing up a hyperscaler account or a finance forecasting exercise.
- Developers and platform teams wanting disposable dev/test environments they can create and tear down themselves.
- Public sector and education teams with residency and audit obligations that are simpler to meet on documented NZ infrastructure.
- Teams building with AI agents who want automation-ready compute that stays in-country by default.
Get started
You can be running a NZ-hosted VPC before your next coffee goes cold. Go to ASI Cloud , register your organisation, and deploy your first VM — the cost estimate is right there before you commit.
If you’d rather talk it through first — sizing, migration, or how self-service fits alongside the managed workloads we already run for you — book a meeting with a NZ-based engineer. Either way, the compromise between fast, affordable, and sovereign is one you no longer have to make.