We’ve worked with over 2000 clients since we started in 2008 and we’ve tried and used pretty much every hosting provider on the market.
Fast, high quality hosting is a critical component of any successful SEO, Adwords or online marketing strategy.
Below you’ll find the Australian hosts we use, trust and recommend both for our own sites and client sites.
The Best Australian Web Hosts we’ve found after working with over 2000 clients.
You’ll see around the internet website speed talked about a lot with big scary stats and numbers thrown around like “every 100 milliseconds of speed equates to 1% less conversion rate” and similar.
I question the validity of a lot of these stats but ultimately you know yourself when a website is slow to load you probably lose patience quickly and click away.
What most of these sites don’t mention is that reliability is equally, if not more important than speed. While a slow website will certainly annoy visitors, a website that’s offline is even worse!
There’s a ton of Australia web hosts but the list below are the hosts we’ve found that are fast AND reliable.
You’ll find a more detailed list of our favourite hosts in the table below but here is each one in a one line summary.
Siteground - the fastest and most reliable general purpose Cpanel host. This is best if you have one or several small, non-Wordpress sites and have a tight budget.
Cloudways - by far the fastest host and can host most of the popular CMSes. If you want the fastest choose this one.
WPEngine - the best Managed WordPress host by a fair margin BUT not cheap and there’s a small extra surcharge for their Australian data centre.
Go with WP Engine if you’re on Woocommerce or a complex WP site that needs high reliability, backups and a staging environment. The extra you spend on hosting here you’ll save elsewhere
Unfortunately most people choose a hosting provider based on price which is not really the best way to do it.
Ultimately with hosting you get what you pay for. Cost is obviously one of the considerations to look at when choosing a provider but that's really only one element of many. Below I’ve summarized the key features or things we look for when choosing a hosting provider.
If you do some Googling around for Magento hosts you’ll find a bunch of articles recommended the usual suspects, Bluehost, Hostgator, Dreamhost, A2 and a bunch of other cheap, rubbish shared hosting provided that simply aren’t good enough in terms of performance or reliability to host Magento.
With hosting you get what you pay for, do you really expect a hosting product that costs less than a coffee at Starbucks to be any good?
I really don’t have to tell you, speed and reliability are key when it comes to a hosting provider.
You know it yourself, if a website is too slow to load you quickly lose patience and click away. Your website visitors and customers are exactly the same.
Your hosting needs to be well matched to the number of visitors you’re expecting and the order volume you’re catering for. If your store revenue is in the millions then you’ll need a much larger server to suit.
Sidenote: we use tools.pingdom.com to test website speed. In a perfect world your site should be loading in under 1 second (where the load begins to feel instant). We also use uptimerobot.com to monitor site uptime.
What is your support expectation?
At some point you’re going to need support. If you’re a larger store doing millions in revenue you’ll ideally need your own dedicated Magento dev resources on top of what the hosting provider offers.
Your website CMS is no different to your smartphone or laptop. It needs regular patches and updates to ensure bugs are taken care of and security holes are patched.
Some hosting providers offer patching as part of their service, others expect you to take care of it. Bottom line, patching needs to be done by someone!
What is your backup strategy? There’s so much digital capital tied up in your website that it’s critical that you at least have some backup system in place taking daily backups.
On bigger sites ideally you’ll need to look at realtime or near realtime backup solutions where the site is backed up upon every change or on an hourly basis.