Best Web Hosting Australia 2024 | Top 14 (March Update)

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Matthew Rogers

Author: Matthew Rogers

Last Updated on July 2, 2023

As a Brisbane-based web agency, we’re quite passionate about finding the best web hosting service in Australia, partially to host our clients (the majority of which are Australian), and partially for our own side-projects (we like to experiment :)).

Let’s get straight into it!

Best Web Hosting in Australia

  1. SiteGround – Best Web Host Overall
  2. A2 Hosting – Best Web Host for Resellers
  3. HostPapa – Best for Value
  4. Hostinger – Cheap Web Host
  5. MediaFortress – Local Web Host for Small Business
  6. GreenGeeks – Best Green Web Hosting for Beginners
  7. Panthur – Great Local Host for eCommerce
  8. WPHosting – Local WordPress Host
  9. Crucial – Australian Green Host
  10. Hosting Cloud
Best Overall
SiteGround - Best Web Host
  • Price: AUD $4.99/month (down from $19.99)
  • Disk space: 10 GB
  • Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
  • Blazing fast Sydney data centre
  • Recommended by WordPress, for WordPress
  • ~100ms Load Time
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • Free SSL, CDN
  • Daily Backups
  • Fantastic customer support
Best for Resellers
A2 Hosting - Experienced, Reliable
  • Price: USD $2.99/month
  • Disk space: Unlimited
  • Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
  • Data centre in Singapore
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • Free SSL
  • Anytime Money-Back Guarantee
Great Value
HostPapa
  • Price: AUD $2.95/month (down from $3.25)
  • Disk space: 100 GB
  • Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets
  • Good speed, but no data centre in Australia
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Free Site Transfer, Domain, and SSL

Over the past 5 to 10 years, we’ve been purchasing a LOT of web hosting accounts (there are a lot of website hosts out there)!

We went through all our accounts (30+ providers), analysed which web hosts are working well for Australia, and which ones aren’t (and why). We then built this massive web hosting comparison to share what we found (and surprisingly, a lot of them aren’t even based in Australia), enjoy!

While we use a LOT of factors when writing our web hosting reviews for Australia (security, support, ease of use, speed, key features, etc), support and speed are the 2 major ones we consider when reviewing a web host.

⚡Let’s take website speed for example, did you know that a 1 second delay means page views decrease by 11%? That means over 1/10 of Australians will just turn away for every second your site is still loading…

This is why having a quality web host is so important!

A few of the sites we’ve been featured on:

Featured on sites

Best Website Hosting Australia 2024 – Reviews

Here are the 15 best web hosting reviews, detailing their cost, support options, and disk space:

1. SiteGround – Best Web Host Overall

About

SiteGround review

SiteGround logo

URL: www.siteground.com.au
Price: AUD $4.99
Disk space: 10 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~100ms Load Time
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Support
  • Free SSL, CDN
  • Daily Backups
  • 500+ Applications Supported
  • Google Cloud with SSD-persistent Storage

SiteGround is, in our opinion, the best web host around, not only are their data centres blazing fast (choose the Sydney data centre for local sites), but they even have their own in-house caching system (SuperCacher) to serve your sites as fast as possible.

They’re one of the very few hosting companies that are recommended by WordPress, for WordPress. So if you’re looking to setup a WordPress site, these guys bring the goods! They can, of course, handle any of the major CMSes with ease.

As secure hosting is an absolute must, we really like their in-house security setup that crawls all their hosted sites, constantly keeping an eye out for potential security issues.

They also have a dedicated security team that tracks new vulnerabilities on a daily basis, and then patches those issues to keep everything running smoothly. It’s very impressive and we can see why Siteground technically falls under the category of managed WordPress hosting (which is usually a lot more expensive). Not surprisingly, they’re also one of the best WordPress hosts for Australia.

Siteground support

They have 3 web hosting plans for shared hosting, starting at only $4.99/mo (down from $19.99)! Oh, + they have a 30-day money-back guarantee too.

SiteGround Control Panel

To maintain all the mentioned features, from storage to emails, SiteGround has a fantastic control panel. It’s sleek, intuitive, and has all the needed functionalities. In our opinion, it’s perhaps the best control panel from a UI/UX perspective.

Very Responsive Support

SiteGround provides a lot of options for customer service including a Knowledge Base, Tutorials, Live Chat, Phone, and Ticket Support. According to the company, Phone and Live Chat Support will help you get instant replies while Tickets would take 10 minutes on average, which is quite impressive.

Siteground also allows you to register any domain names with them if you haven’t already got them.

Smooth Performance

When it comes to speed, SiteGround has plenty to offer. They provide SSDs for faster website loading times compared to traditional drives, as well as extra tweaks and custom setups to optimise speed.

As mentioned before, they also have a custom-built caching plugin called SuperCacher for even faster loading speeds (run a quick speed test on any SiteGround site and you’ll see how fast it is).

The data centres of the company are located in the US, UK, AU, NL, and SG, so their global reach is very good. And, of course, a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
StartUp110 GB$4.99
GrowBigUnlimited20 GB$7.49
GoGeekUnlimited40 GB$12.49

Pros

  • Great security
  • Sydney data centre
  • Multiple hosting servers around the world
  • Free CDN, SSL, etc
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • Unlimited bandwidth

Cons

  • N/A

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2. A2 Hosting – Best Web Host for Resellers

About

A2 Hosting review

A2 Hosting logo

URL: www.a2hosting.com
Price: USD $2.99
Disk space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~50-250ms Load Time
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Support
  • DDOS Protection
  • Free SSL
  • Anytime Money-Back Guarantee
  • Free Site Transfers
  • Cpanel Control Panel
  • Eco-friendly Hosting

With 24/7 support, super-fast SSD drives, unlimited storage space & a Singapore-based data-centre for max speed for Aussie sites… they’re a well-deserved #3 on the list and one of the best hosting providers when it comes to reseller and eCommerce hosting!

The reseller king!

There are merely a few web hosting providers better than A2 Hosting, as you can notice in this list. However, there’s probably no provider better than A2 at reseller hosting.

A2 Hosting’s reseller plans are legendary. They have four of these, including…

  • Bronze: Priced $13.99/month, this comes with 30 GB SSD storage & 400 GB transfer.
  • Silver: Costing $18.47/month, Silver includes 75 GB storage and 600 GB transfer.
  • Gold: Starting at $24.41/month, this plan offers 150 GB disk space and 1000 GB transfer.
  • Platinum: The best of all, costing $40.91/month, Platinum includes 200 GB storage and 2000 GB transfer.

Other plans

A2 Hosting offers a variety of web hosting solutions, from shared hosting & WP hosting to VPS and dedicated hosting plans.

A2 Hosting features

They offer 3 shared hosting packages, their cheapest web hosting plan starts at only USD $2.99/mo.

Useful Support

They offer 24/7/365 customer service through all the usual channels like Chat, Phone, and Support Tickets. Reviews are pretty good and things usually get resolved quite fast. They also offer free site migration to make the transition to their services as smooth as possible.

Turbo Servers

A2 Hosting is very proud of their “Turbo Servers”, which provides 20x speed compared to your average server. They do this through a combination of an enhanced Apache alternative, more resources per user and fewer users per server. They also have custom caching and, of course, use SSD’s. It’s a very good setup with a reliable uptime. They have 4 data centres around the world for a decent global reach comparable to SiteGround.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / MonthFeatures
Startup1100 GBUSD $2.99Great for a single site
DriveUnlimitedUnlimitedUSD $5.99More sites + resources
Turbo BoostUnlimitedUnlimitedUSD $6.9920x faster
Turbo MaxUnlimitedUnlimitedUSD $12.9920x faster + 5x more resources

Pros

  • 4 global data centres
  • Unlimited SSD storage
  • Unlimited data transfer
  • Anytime money back

Cons

  • Charges in USD

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3. HostPapa – Great Value

About

HostPapa review

Price: AUD $2.95
Disk space: 100 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~20-500ms Load Time
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Support
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Website Builder
  • Free Site Transfer
  • Free Domain Registration
  • Free SSL
  • 400+ Applications Supported
  • CloudLinux Servers

As far as cost to value ratio goes, HostPapa is nearly impossible to beat. For only AUD $2.95/mo, you get 100GB of SSD disk space, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name, and great 24/7 support!

The only real downside here is that they don’t have any data centres in or near Australia.

However, HostPapa’s data centres are very good. They boast 99.9% uptime, and they deliver.

They offer a lot of other freebies too, like free migration from your old host if needed. They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy, it’s pretty impressive.

HostPapa features

So if you’re looking for quality hosting that’s affordable, these guys bring the goods! Aside from having a handy website builder, they of course also support all the popular CMSs like WordPress, Joomla and others (400+ apps with 1-click installers).

They use the industry-standard cPanel as their control panel. It has all the functionalities from file manager, email creation, and add-on domains to script installers and security tools.

On a cool side-note, they launched as one of the first green hosts around, and they’ve kept it up, offsetting all power consumption with eco-friendly, green energy sources.

A lot of services on offer

HostPapa offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and WordPress hosting, as well as web design services, G Suite, and Office 365 integration support. They can also take care of your domain name registrations (which includes .au domains like .com.au, .net.au, etc).

Support that works!

HostPapa provides 24/7 customer service through phone, live chat, and support tickets. Usually, budget hosts like these lack in support, but HP’s support is surprisingly responsive and helpful in fixing issues! If you need more knowledge, you can join a weekly webinar or book a virtual training session (free for 30 minutes) with their hosting expert. Also, they have a well-rounded knowledge base for FAQs.

Our take

In the end, these guys are experienced, and offer affordable hosting at a GREAT price of only AUD $2.95/mo (Exclusive MangoMatter discount, down from $8.95)!

A no-brainer in our book!

Hosting Plans (regular)

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Starter1100 GB$2.95
Plus10100 GB$5.06
ProUnlimitedUnlimited$5.06

Pros

  • Plenty of SSD storage
  • A lot of freebies
  • Great 24/7 support
  • Charges in AUD
  • Can take care of your .com.au needs
  • 30-day money-back guarantee

Cons

  • No data centre in Australia

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4. Hostinger – Cheap Web Host

About

Hostinger review

Hostinger Logo

URL: hostinger.com
Price: USD $1.99
Disk space: 10 GB
Support: Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~20-250ms Load Time
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • hPanel Custom Control Panel
  • Cache Manager
  • GIT Support
  • Free SSL
  • Free Domain
  • Zyro Website Builder

Hostinger is experiencing some insane growth at the moment, and with good reason too!  They manage to provide web hosting solutions at very affordable rates while maintaining great quality.

The thing we liked was their onboarding process for new users, the setup was one of the smoothest we’ve been through (and we’ve been through a LOT of hosts over the years). Add to that the fact that they have servers around the world (including in Singapore).

And if your target market isn’t in Australia, you can just choose any of the additional following locations to get your site hosted: United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Lithuania, Brazil, or Indonesia.

Hostinger scaling hosting

As for hosting plans, they have the usual shared hosting (which is what the majority of people need), WordPress hosting (same as their shared hosting but it’s there just to highlight that they know how to host WP sites very efficiently), Cloud hosting, VPS, and email hosting. All their plans come with the usual SSD fast storage, 99.9% uptime guarantee, Free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, etc.

A Custom Control Panel

We do need to mention their custom-built control panel, it’s quite impressive. While most hosts use cPanel as the control panel for adding and deploying sites, Hostinger created their own. It looks a lot cleaner than cPanel and definitely is a nice value-add to their services. It’s called hPanel and it’s a very easy to use, intuitive control panel anyone can navigate through regardless of their tech knowledge. Moreover, it doesn’t lose out on any functionality…from emails to domain names, you can manage everything.

They even own Zyro, one of the best website builders for Australia.

24/7 Support

When it comes to customer support, they have a pretty detailed knowledge base, complete with tutorials to help you get started. They also offer 24/7/365 live chat support in case you need it. In general, support is responsive and helpful.

In Summary

They know what they’re doing, you get quality hosting at very affordable prices and a decent support team to back it up. And just in case you’re not happy with their services, they even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

They have 3 shared hosting plans, with the cheapest being only USD $1.99/mo (down from $7.99).

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Single Shared Hosting150 GBUSD $1.99
Premium Shared Hosting100100 GBUSD $2.99
Business Shared Hosting100200 GBUSD $3.99

Pros

  • Easy to setup
  • Great performance
  • Super affordable
  • Fast data centre in Singapore + global network

Cons

  • Charges in USD, still absurdly cheap though

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5. MediaFortress – Best Australian Web Hosting for Small Business

About

mediafortress.com.au

Price: AUD $7.70
Disk space: 1 GB
Support: Phone, Tickets

Features

  • 100% Australian
  • 24/7 Support
  • Daily Backups
  • 99% Uptime Guarantee
  • SSH Access
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Web Design & Marketing Services Available

They started in 2009, are still 100% Australian owned and definitely know the industry quite well.

While they’re definitely on the expensive side and their basic plan only includes 1 site and 1 GB of storage, the advantage they have is that they’re also a digital marketing agency, so they can not only help with hosting but also with the site build and marketing itself. A one-stop shop basically. Their services include web design, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

They use the standard cPanel control panel to help with managing your sites, this also comes with the usual easy one-click installers for most of the popular content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

Media Fortress takes server security very seriously. Aside from daily backups, they also have a firewall and spam protection measures in place to keep the data centres clean.

MediaFortress features

We haven’t had to use their customer service, but they offer to help out either over the phone, or through support tickets. Because they’re a smaller hosting company, the support is usually more personal, with people that care about their reputation.

Also no complaints about the speed. They’re using well-optimised local servers and guarantee a 99% uptime guarantee, great for your average business sites or personal blogs.

They’re a solid choice for those wanting to get their website built, hosted, and marketed by the same company.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Basic11 GB$7.70
Business23 GB$15
ProfessionalUnlimited10 GB$30

Pros

  • One-stop shop
  • Quality services

Cons

  • Expensive

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6. GreenGeeks – Best Green Web Hosting for Beginners

About

GreenGeeks review

GreenGeeks logo

URL: www.greengeeks.com
Price: USD $2.95
Disk space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~50-450ms Load Time
  • 99.99% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Live Chat Support
  • Free Domain
  • Free SSL
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Free Site Transfers
  • LSCache, MariaDB
  • Custom Security Rules
  • Green Hosting (300% Energy Replacement)

GreenGeeks is going through a massive growth spurt at the moment. The benefit they have is that they’re putting back 300% of the energy they use back onto the grid, very very cool.

They buy more than 600,000 KiloWH/year in the form of RECs. RECs or renewable energy certificates are market instruments that let the company pay a wind energy generating company to produce on their behalf.

Their services and support are pretty impressive, but they don’t have any data centres near Australia (yet), hopefully, they’ll get that sorted soon. We really like their custom-built security tech to keep everything running clean and smooth. While they have a website builder, they also support most major CMS’s out of the box.

Greengeeks onboarding

GreenGeeks offers shared web hosting solutions (great for small Australian businesses and blogs), reseller hosting, dedicated servers, WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting. They also have a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with their services.

They have always been good with support. They offer it 24/7, via the phone, chat, or support tickets. Their support staff are pretty knowledgeable and are well-trained. If the problem is very basic, you can look into their resources. They have tutorials for many things, including WordPress, Elementor, cPanel, Emails, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, and more.

When it comes to speed, they know how to optimise their hosting servers, and it shows in the speed they offer. They use a combination of fast SSD’s, PowerCacher, and PHP7 to really try and get as much juice out of their servers as possible, with great uptime consistency. Pretty impressive!

Their cheapest web hosting plan starts at USD $2.95/mo.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / MonthFeatures
Lite150 GBUSD $2.95Standard Performance
ProUnlimitedUnlimitedUSD $4.95Better Performance
PremiumUnlimitedUnlimitedUSD $8.95Best Performance

Pros

  • Eco-friendly
  • Affordable
  • Great support
  • Unlimited disk space

Cons

  • No local servers

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7. Panthur – Great Local Host for eCommerce

About

Panthur review

URL: www.panthur.com.au
Price: AUD $6
Disk space: 10 GB
Support: Phone, Tickets

Features

  • ~200ms Load Time in Australia
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • Australian Servers
  • 24/7 Support
  • Free SSL
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Website Builder

Panthur is an experienced Australian web hosting provider that initially started as a non-commercial organisation. They offer super-fast web hosting services and 24/7 customer support (which is also lightning fast). They’re a local web host with servers in AU, though have none overseas if you want to target other countries.

Panthur has 3 main plans that you can additionally customise: Economy, Business and Stealth hosting, each level increasing in server resources as you go up. All include free SSL certificates.

They also offer domain name registrations and reseller hosting web designers and agencies. They got bought by Hostopia and while the switch was a bit rocky, everything looks to be back normal… including their fast support.

Panthur features

Their cheapest web hosting plan starts at $6/month (though we recommend going with their bronze business plan for that perfect value/cost balance).

Panthur provides 24/7 support through phone and support tickets. They’re usually pretty fast at responding, and most issues get resolved quickly.

As for speed, while they don’t have a custom caching plugin like SiteGround… as their data centres are located in AU, and combined with the power of their servers, loading times are very good across the board (perfect for online stores), just make sure you choose a hosting plan that fits your site (meaning that you probably shouldn’t choose their economy plan to host a massive forum).

As they use cPanel as their control panel, installing your favourite CMS is a breeze with one-click installers for almost all of them.

Panthur’s security measures are also worth noting. From encrypted cPanel & email access, a custom web application firewall and realtime blacklist monitoring, to hotlink/leech protection… they make sure you’re protected at all times.

And last but not least, they offer a Click Restore system which enables you to create and deploy backups at any time, and it’s free with every plan.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Mini12 GB$6
Advanced46 GB$11
Professional610 GB$16

Pros

  • Local web host
  • Great performance
  • Good support
  • 3 data centres in AU

Cons

  • No overseas servers
  • Only 2 GB of storage on their basic plan

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8. WPHosting – Local WordPress Host

About

wphosting.com.au

Price: AUD $19
Disk space: 5 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~250ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • Australian Servers
  • 1 Click Staging for Premium Plans
  • 24/7 100% Australian Support
  • GZIP, HTTP/2, PHP7+, MariaDB
  • Free SSL
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
  • Free Site Migration
  • Always-On DDoS Protection

We do like these guys. If you’re running WordPress sites and have the budget, they’ll make sure your site runs silky smooth. That being said, there’s no phone support on their basic plan and I didn’t see any free SSL options either.

WPhosting features

What they do offer is high-quality hosting for WordPress, including premium features like DDOS protection, daily automated backups, and malware scans to keep everything super secure.

They offer support through all the usual channels like Phone, Live Chat, and Support Tickets. As they offer WP hosting, their support staff are experts at WordPress!

Their servers are fully optimised for running WordPress, and it shows. The loading times are very impressive, they use SSD’s, PHP7, Gzip, and MariaDB to optimise speed! They also host some really big brands, so the quality of their hosting services is definitely on point!

Their most affordable web hosting plan is AUD $19/mo and comes with 5 GB of SSD storage.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Start Up15 GB$19
Business410 GB$29
Corporate620 GB$49

Pros

  • WordPress hosting kings
  • Great support

Cons

  • Probably won’t work if you’re on a budget…
  • Or don’t use WordPress

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9. Crucial – Australian Green Host

About

Crucial review

URL: www.crucial.com.au
Price: AUD $22.90
Disk space: 50 GB
Support: Phone, Tickets

Features

  • ~300ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • Australian Servers
  • 24/7 Support
  • Free SSL
  • CloudLinux Servers
  • Daily Backups
  • Free Site Migration
  • DDoS Protection

Since they started in 2003, Crucial has grown quite a lot, known for its simplicity. At $22.90/mo though, there are far cheaper options available that come with more features.

When it comes to managing and configuring your sites, they use cPanel like most hosts. This makes it easy to install whatever CMS you prefer, as well as dive deeper in the file system if needed, configure email spam filters, and much more.

Crucial features

They offer WordPress hosting, reseller hosting and VPS hosting (which comes in 5 flavours and includes solutions for Windows and Linux). Additionally, they also offer Gsuite services to set up and manage your professional email accounts.

Their real strength we think is their range of VPS options we alluded to above. They offer both managed and unmanaged cPanel VPS, Windows, Linux, and something they call Blaze SSD VPS hosting. This last type is a Cloud VPS service that has insane performance and offers easy scalability. VPS pricing ranges from $10/mo all the way to $500+/mo for super-powerful servers.

Crucial offers 24x7x365 support through phone and support tickets. Reviews are generally positive.

When it comes to security, it’s rock-solid with daily backups and DDOS protection available on all plans. SSL certificates are also free, which is great as they’re a must these days (definitely if you want to rank in Google… they prefer secure sites).

With local Australian servers running on SSD’s, speeds are solid.

Hosting Plans

PlanWebsitesDisk SpacePrice / Month
Web Hosting250 GB$22.9
Web Hosting Plus3100 GB$32.9
Web Hosting Advanced4150 GB$42.9

Pros

  • Great at VPS hosting
  • Simplicity is not a bad thing
  • High-quality services

Cons

  • Expensive shared hosting

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10. HostingCloud

About

hostingcloud.com.au

Price: AUD $3
Disk space: 5 GB
Support: Tickets

Features

  • ~800ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • Australian Servers
  • 100% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Support
  • Free SSL
  • Daily Backups
  • Free cPanel Migration
  • DDoS Protection

The new kids on the block, like brand-spanking new. They’re definitely cheap and offer free SSL certificates, but like most Australian web hosts, are tied to AU unless you use a CDN (which SiteGround and A2 Hosting, for example, offer for free). They look perfect for small businesses wanting to get their feet wet.

They have 3 plans, one with 5 GB of SSD storage, 10 GB, and 20 GB. Both include cool features like 7 Day Backup Retention and Network DDoS Protection. You’re allowed 1 website per plan, so if you need additional sites, you’ll need to buy more plans… which makes sense.

Like most other web hosts, Hosting Cloud uses cPanel. It’s easy to use and comes with handy tools like one-click installers for WordPress, Joomla, it has email and spam filter management features, a file manager, DNS zone editor, and much more.

We do like that they offer free cPanel migrations from other hosts, it saves you a few dollars trying to find a web dev to migrate and deploy the site for you.

As they’re a budget host, they only offer support through tickets, though they’re pretty responsive, so generally a thumbs up from us.

As for speed, they use Dell PowerEdge servers running on SSD’s. Sites run as smooth as expected, pretty good for a budget host imho.

Hosting Cloud also offers domain name registrations if you don’t have your domain name yet. This, of course, includes .com.au domains. It’s good to know that they offer domain privacy for free (though it’s not available for .com.au names).

Hosting Plans

PlanDisk SpacePrice / Month
Lite5 GB$3
Pro10 GB$5
Pro Max20 GB$8

Pros

  • Cheap
  • Good value

Cons

  • Might need better support options
  • No overseas servers

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11. Digital Pacific

About

Digital Pacific review

URL: www.digitalpacific.com.au
Price: AUD $9.90
Disk space: 2 GB
Support: Phone, Tickets

Features

  • ~1000ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • Australian Servers
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Phone and Email Support
  • Free SSL
  • cPanel Control Panel
  • Daily Backups
  • DDoS Protection

Digital Pacific started in 2000, and quickly grew to become one of the more well-known providers for web hosting in Australia. While they have a lot of choices when it comes to hosting options, they’re a tad more expensive compared to others on our list.

When it comes to hosting types and solutions, they offer a range of shared plans, reseller hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, WordPress hosting, and more.

Their shared plans are split up in 3 types: Personal, Business, and Premium. Each of those is then again split up into multiple options. If we focus on their basic plans, then we find the Personal basic plan for $9.90/mo which comes with 2 GB of storage, 1 website, and 2 email accounts.

At the other end of the spectrum, their most expensive shared hosting solution called Premium Pro boasts 100 GB of storage, 4 sites, and unlimited email accounts at $14.90/mo.

All their plans have DDOS protection and daily backups by default, which is a nice touch. As for configuring and managing your hosting accounts, you’ll have the choice of 3 different control panels: cPanel, Plesk, and WHM. We would recommend cPanel as it’s the easiest to use for most people.

If you’re going for a reseller account, however, WHM would be the way to go. It makes managing multiple hosting accounts really easy.

Digital Pacific also offer domain registration services. From registration to transfers, you can get your domain name needs sorted with them. They have both local .com.au names and global ones available.

We also like how eco-friendly they are, and the way they give back to the community by involvement in great projects and other events like Movember.

Digital Pacific offers 24/7 support via phone and support tickets through their client portal. They’re usually very responsive and can resolve any issues efficiently.

Like most other web hosting providers, Digital Pacific focuses on local servers running SSD’s for storage, and it works well for your average personal and business websites.

Pros

  • Experienced
  • Lots of choices

Cons

  • A bit expensive
  • Performance (might be improved since our last test though)

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12. Bluehost

About

BlueHost review

BlueHost logo

URL: www.bluehost.com
Price: USD $2.95
Disk space: 50 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~100-400ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Phone and Email Support
  • Free SSL
  • Free Domain Name
  • 75+ Apps Supported
  • Free Site Transfer
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Bluehost is a very old host now, we consider it one of the veterans among website hosts (similar to Godaddy, Dreamhost, and Hostgator). Once upon a time, they ruled the kingdom together with HostGator (they were to go-to hosts if you were a small business), now they both got bought by EIG, the massive corporation that’s buying up as many web hosts as it can (like iPage and Fatcow, which are on this list).

Bluehost went downhill fast over the last few years, which definitely hurt the company, luckily, lately, they’ve been improving their services and support, to the point where they might start moving up our list again.

As for types of web hosting, they offer shared hosting, cloud hosting, WP hosting, VPS, and dedicated hosting.

BlueHost gives you a Knowledge Base, Video Tutorials, Live Chat, Ticket Submission, and Telephone Support. They are available 24/7. Reviews regarding BlueHosts’ customer support service were still mostly negative. <- but again, they’re working on it.

The performance (including speed) of their cheapest Shared Hosting plan is undisclosed. It only states that the said plan has “Standard” Performance. According to their support representative, Standard Performance means you are given 25GB of RAM and your website will load within 2-3 seconds.

Upon research on their knowledge base, you can have more CPU, memory, and resources for USD 25.99 per month. However, their Pro Package is labelled as “High Performance” wherein it has 80% fewer accounts per web server which allow it to use more resources per account. With this package comes increased speed and power due to fewer users. Data centres are located in Utah, USA, meaning that you’ll need a CDN like Cloudflare to get decent loading times for Australian websites.

Pros

  • Free SSL
  • Plenty of disk space
  • Affordable

Cons

  • US servers
  • Rocky reputation

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13. Cloudways

About

www.cloudways.com

cloudways logo

Price: USD $12
Disk space: 25 GB
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • Load Time (TTFB) Depends on Cloud Provider
  • Choose from DigitalOcean, VULTR, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7/365 Support
  • Free SSL
  • Dedicated Firewalls
  • Varnish, Memcached, and Redis
  • Staging Environment
  • Free Migration
  • Great Security

Cloudways is a different beast, they use other companies’ raw servers and allow you to deploy, manage, and monitor high-performance apps and websites on those servers, cutting out the usual web hosting middle-man. If you’re even slightly techie, this can save you a lot of money.

They serve users primarily in the software development industry. Their core values are to deliver excellent hosting services at the best prices possible. They pride themselves in having a team of hosting professionals that understand the needs of software developers. Their primary goal is to make developers’ lives easier, which is why they offer one-click installations for popular software including WordPress, Magento, and Prestashop.

Cloudways is a one-stop shop for all of the hosting needs of your software business. They provide servers, operating systems, and software. They also offer a 24/7 customer support team, which is highly beneficial to their customers.

They work with massive cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and more. The real benefit here is the scalability cloud hosting offers. This works great for resource-intensive web applications… like huge forums or e-commerce sites.

Cloudways gives you various options for support including a Knowledge Base, Ticket Submission, Live Chat, Platform Status Page, and Online Fill-Up Forms. Through the fill-up forms, you can request a call, inquire on sales, and become a partner.

Their reviews are superb. Most reviews stated that their customer support system was very quick and prompt. Representatives know what to do to fix both easy and complicated problems. Overall, customers were pleased with their customer support service.

With their cheapest plan, 1GB worth of memory (RAM) is provided. Servers are based on solid-state drives for faster loading speeds compared to traditional mechanical drives. Servers are also PHP 7 Ready. PHP 7 is the choice of web developers at present giving superior and faster performance of websites and applications compared to PHP 5.6. CloudwaysCDN also allows for faster website loading speeds across the world as data cached in multiple locations around the world.

They have Optimized Stacks with Advanced Cache such as Memcached, Varnish, and Redis for expedited responses. Fast hosting speeds for WordPress and Magento is also available because of its Breeze cache and Full Page cache, respectively. Also, they currently have 60 data centres around the world which you can choose from. Truly one of the best cloud hosting companies around. Run any speed test you like and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Pros

  • High-performance hosting
  • Very scalable

Cons

  • More difficult to master

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14. Inmotion Hosting

About

Inmotion Hosting review

InMotion Hosting logo

URL: www.inmotionhosting.com
Price: USD $6.39
Disk space: Unlimited
Support: Phone, Live Chat, Tickets

Features

  • ~50-600ms Load Time (TTFB)
  • 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
  • 24/7 Support
  • Free Domain
  • Free SSL
  • Free Automatic Backup
  • Free Migration
  • DDoS Protection
  • 90-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Inmotion Hosting is an affordable hosting provider, as they offer hosting plans starting at just $3.95/month. You get access to unlimited hosting space, databases, email accounts, unlimited bandwidth, and a free domain name. You get cPanel access, free site transfers, and free tech support, and Inmotion Hosting uses Litespeed technology, which utilizes SSD servers to provide your website with up to 400% faster page loads, compared to using traditional HDD servers.

The Inmotion Hosting customer support is top-notch, as they offer a 24/7 live chat, phone support, a knowledge base, and video tutorials.

As for hosting options, InMotion offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and specialised WordPress hosting. They also offer web design services if you can’t find anyone locally (which would be odd as web designers are everywhere these days).

In addition to the usual phone support, knowledge base, and support tickets, they also have a Skype account you can contact. Generally, the user reviews are positive, and support is responsive and efficient at fixing issues.

With the combo of their business class server configs and PHP7 support, speed and performance is very smooth across the board. They also offer WordPress specialised hosting for even better performance for WP websites.

Pros

  • High-quality services
  • Good reputation

Cons

  • Servers in the US
  • Expensive

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Before we get into the nitty-gritty of choosing which type of best Australian web hosting works for you, let’s answer one of the most common questions we get regarding hosting terminology. What exactly is the difference between domain hosting, web hosting, and domain registration?

Domain Name Registration

Let’s start with domain registration. This refers to the buying or registering of a domain name (yourcompany.com.au), which can be done through a registrar. Most web hosts offer this service, meaning you can buy your domain name and host your site with the same provider, which is the ideal situation as support is centralised.

If you’re just looking to buy domain names and not web hosting, it’s best to go through a normal registrar like NameCheap. Registrars have the authority to delegate the sales of domain names and assign them for IP addresses (you’d be surprised how many domains get registered on a yearly basis, just check our internet usage statistics page for some mind-boggling numbers).

What is web hosting?

Next up, web hosting. This refers to the online space where you host the files that make up your website, it’s why you’re on this page, to find the best web host for your website.

SSD storage

Once you have registered your domain name, you then point that name toward your hosting space to make the site show up in browsers. Web hosting can cost anywhere from 1$/mo for budget hosts to $500+/mo for a VPS or dedicated servers.

Email Hosting

This refers to a company that can host your emails. This can be a provider that specifically focuses on email hosting, or it can be your Australian hosting provider offering the service. We use Gmail for our email needs.

Domain Hosting

Finally, domain hosting. This isn’t actually a thing, domain hosting is a combination of domain registration and web page hosting, presumably used by people actually looking for web hosting, but don’t know the correct terminology so they search for “best domain hosting Australia“.

How to choose a web host in Australia?

Alrighty, now that that’s clear, let’s get stuck into which factors you need to consider when looking for the best web hosting services.

Server Location: In Australia, or overseas?

If you’re based in Australia, the easiest thing to do is to look for a web host that’s either in or close-ish to Australia, it’s that simple. Why? Because if you host your website on a server in the US for instance, you’ll probably encounter fun issues like lag, slower load times, delays, etc. Server location matters, but don’t worry about it on a city-specific level, so it doesn’t matter if you’re looking for the best web hosts in Brisbane, Sydney, or Melbourne… you won’t notice the speed difference anyway.

Using a CDN: Going Global

That being said, just because your site is hosted on a specific server in a specific location doesn’t mean you can’t get speedy loading times around the world, in every country. With the help of a CDN, you can serve up your site everywhere with minimal lag.

server location map

A Content Distribution Network is a set of technologies which are used to deliver content to users.  CDNs provide a mechanism for delivering content to multiple users all over the world with a high level of reliability and performance, as well as speeding up the download and rendering times.  It is a significant benefit over traditional web hosting.  CDNs are also used to distribute software packages to end-users.

This not only helps with loading times, but can also block spammers, increase security, and protect you from potential DDOS attacks. One of the most popular CDNs is CloudFlare, they actually have a free plan and a lot of web hosts integrate with them pretty seamlessly.

Check server uptime guarantees.

You need to know whether you can rely on your hosting company to provide stable servers and maximized server uptime. We started tracking both overall uptime, and response times for the major hosting services on our web host status page. Most web hosting providers will guarantee you a 99.9% uptime. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, our top 5 does a great job at maintaining maximum uptime though. You need a reliable web hosting provider.

How much storage do you get?

The amount of storage implies how much files you can upload to the server. For blogs and small websites, you won’t need more than a couple of GB’s, which is what most cheap web hosting companies offer. But if you’re looking to host a larger website, you should get a hosting plan with more storage capacity. Make sure to give an advantage to companies that use SSD drives for storing data instead of regular HDDs. SSD storage performs up to x10 better in reading and writing speeds.

How is the performance and response time?

While this one might seem easy, it’s actually multi-layered. Most people think that getting the fastest web hosting service is a combination of server performance + Australian-based location, meaning that as long as the server runs smoothly, and the location of the data centre is in Australia (as mentioned above), it should be alright. This is definitely not the case though.

Server speed

In fact, there are multiple web hosts with servers in Singapore or overseas that outperform ones with servers in AU. The truth is that the best hosts usually use custom-built systems and scripts to squeeze as much performance as possible out of their data centres. If you combine that with superior hardware and features like server-side caching, PHP7 support, LiteSpeed integration, it’ll blow the Australian web hosting competition out of the water.

The correct server config can really make a difference when it comes to loading times and speed, just check our SiteGround vs HostGator comparison for the difference there (and don’t forget, site speed is now a ranking factor according to Google, so it’s important for SEO as well).

We use Keycdn’s ping tool to check response times for our website hosting providers.

Does the support team have your back?

If you’re searching for the best website hosting Australia has to offer, you want to ensure their support team is reliable. First, we look at the number of support options and their response times. These can include phone support, live chat, support tickets, a detailed knowledge base, and even video tutorials.

We’ve found that support tickets are still the most efficient way of getting most issues resolved, they’re also the most easily scalable for the web host (which is critical when an entire server goes down and they receive a massive influx of complaints).

Then we need to consider if the host outsources their support, or if it’s in-house, both options have their pros and cons, with outsourced support being better for scalability and consistency, but in-house support is usually quicker on the ball and more knowledgeable.

Email Features

If you want the complete hosting package from a single provider, you need to check for email hosting features (usually more important for people looking for business web hosting as they’ll probably need multiple email addresses). Not all web hosting services allow you to create email accounts for your domains.

If they do, check whether they provide an interface for the webmail, maybe offer unlimited email (usually not the case but you never know), and integration with external services. Also, watch out for limitations. Some providers allow you to create up to 100 email addresses or send 200 emails per hour.

Backups, how often are they made?

Backups are very important, but unfortunately, it’s low on the priority list for most people. You’ll need to back up your website, database, and email files on a regular basis (ideally with daily backups).

Check whether the company offers backups and how often do they back up your files. Also, find out how you can restore the files if something goes wrong. Some companies charge for a backup restore, while others provide free service.

How many sites per account?

This is important if you plan to host more than one website with your website hosting plan. The cheaper hosting plans are often limited to only one website.

That being said, if you see super cheap plans with unlimited domains, know that the overall performance will most likely go downhill fast the more domains you add. This is because your server resources will not scale according to the number of domains you’re using, resulting in really poor performance on all your sites.

SSL certificates, security is a must!

Securing your site with an SSL certificate is quickly becoming a requirement rather than an option, so not only e-commerce sites need one, but every other site as well. Google will even label non-https sites as non-secure, which will impact your conversion rates. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is basically a technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server (web host) and a client (the browser). SSL enables personal info like credit card numbers and login details to be transmitted securely.

When you’re researching potential web hosts, see if they offer free SSL certificates (preferably with an easy 1-click install option like SiteGround does). If they don’t, you can still get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt, and ask your host to install it for you. That being said, the best website hosting services should offer this for free by default.

Which type of Australian web hosting is right for your site?

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best web hosting services in Australia?

According to our research and tests, we would recommend the following web hosts.

  1. SiteGround – Best Web Host
  2. A2 Hosting – Best Web Host for Resellers
  3. HostPapa – Great value
  4. Hostinger – Cheap Web Host

How much is web hosting per year in Australia?

Web hosting can cost as little as $20 per year, though that would be on the cheap side. If you want a quality web host for your business website or blog, then you can expect to be paying around $60 per year. It could be more expensive if you want to host bigger websites like e-commerce stores because you might need more disk space or CPU resources and RAM.

How can I host my website for free in Australia?

You can host your website for free with WordPress.com and similar services. They take care of everything but you will get stuck with a subdomain rather than a more professional domain (yourbusiness.com.au). With WordPress it would be yourbusiness.wordpress.com, other services that offer similar free hosting would be Wix and Blogger.

Can I host my website on Google?

Google do not host normal websites or business websites, you need a dedicated web hosting provider to host your site. Google does own a service called Blogger that enables you to get a basic website for free, but you’ll be tied into a specific content management system without much flexibility design-wise.

Can I host my own website on my computer?

You can host your own site on your computer by using a local installation. WAMP is the correct term to use and you can use WampServer to install the full stack. It’s not super easy to do if you’re not familiar with things like MySQL, PHP, Apache, etc. The easiest thing to do would be to follow an online guide on downloading WP from wordpress.org and installing it locally.

Which hosting is best for SEO? – Does hosting affect SEO?

As long the hosting company’s servers’ IPs aren’t notorious for spreading spam traffic on the internet, there’s no direct effect of a hosting provider on SEO. Indirectly, though, quality hosting is crucial for SEO.

Search engines such as Google take loading speed, bounce rate, site availability, and server location into consideration in its ranking algorithm. And the hosting company has a lot to do with all the mentioned factors. For higher speed & lower bounce rate, fast hosting is needed. A site’s availability is the same as the hosting’s uptime. And the server location depends on the hosting provider’s data centre (s).

Considering all, the best hosting providers for SEO are HostPapa, SiteGround, and A2 Hosting.

How do I choose a website host in Australia?

If you want to personally decide on a host, you need to do what we reviewers/testers do: experiment for speed, ease of use, features, uptime, technical support, and more.

A better, and more practical way, to choose a website host is by reading/listening to ones who have experienced many web hosts first-hand.

How much does it cost to host a website on Google?

Google is a search engine. You don’t need to pay anything to be on Google. You host your website on the hosting provider’s servers. For example, if you buy hosting from HostPapa, your site’s data is stored and delivered from HostPapa’s physical server ⁠— Google has nothing to do with it.

However, Google also provides hosting with its Google Cloud. The pricing of that depends on your usage ⁠— you are billed based on the bandwidth & resources you use.

Can I keep my domain name when I change a host?

Yes, you can keep your domain name when you change your host. In fact, in most cases, the domain is with one company and hosting with another. However, if it came free with the hosting plan, you will need to pay for the domain to the provider.

Does Google have free Web hosting?

Google doesn’t have free web hosting. But, you can try Google cloud for free ⁠— Google very generously provides free credits for first-time users.

Can you code your own website for free?

If you want to code your website from scratch, of course, you can. You just need to know HTML, CSS, JS, MySQL, and PHP, at the very least. Alternatively, you can also download ready-made templates and edit them for free.

As a matter of fact, that’s the whole business of web designers and developers ⁠— creating a website!