We regularly have clients ask for advice around hosting their Australian WordPress website – and rightly so, there are more hosting companies out there than we could fit into a blog post!
But with that said, there are a handful of really good hosts out there. How do you know the right one?
Hosting as an investment
Hosting for your business should be looked at as an investment, as much as (strictly speaking) it is a business expense.
Hosting is the computing power that delivers your website to the end user. WordPress is essentially an application, so that computing power does need to factor in the application requirements for WordPress.
Isn’t all hosting equal?
While hosting is somewhat of a commodity, all hosting is not equal.
Paying $5 per month (or less!) for your host will result in a website that is slow to load and likely susceptible to being hacked or maliciously targeted.
Why is this? To achieve such low prices, hosts will pack a large number of websites onto a single server. More websites means less resources to run your website, which equals a slower load time
It’s like opening a lot of applications on your computer at a time and running them all at once – if you run Word, Excel, Photoshop, Illustrator and several videos all at once, you’ll see your own personal computer slow down. Servers running too many websites are exactly the same!
What should I look for with a potential host?
Typically we suggest looking for a host that is local to your end user. That will result in faster load times for your end user, which increases conversion significantly.
As a rule, you should expect to pay upwards of AU$15 per month for a basic hosting package. If you are wanting to run large e-commerce or resource intensive applications, budget significantly more.
Who do you recommend?
We have a hit-list of local hosts that we recommend dealing with; additionally we have business to business relationships with a number of Australian hosts and can set up your hosting for you and manage that relationship with the host on your behalf.
If you’d like a recommendation, just reach out.
