The BEST VPS Hosting in Australia

Most people choose a web host based on price but when you care about raw performance (and performance under heavy load), uptime and marketing like SEO, Facebook and Google Ads, that's probably not the most thorough selection criteria. On this page you'll find hosts that we've tried, test and use ourselves - quality, high performance hosts, that aren't necessarily the cheap, but are the hosts that'll get the job done!

You’ll find more detail about these hosts in the table below but here’s a short summary of each one:

1. Siteground - Siteground have an excellent managed VPS product running on top of Google Cloud. This is probably the least technical of the options here so if you're looking for a VPS that's has a familiar management interface go with this option.
2. Cloudways - Cloudways is probably the provider we recommend the most. They combine a speed optimised server stack from one of several providers (you choose), easy to use interface but you still get the dedicated power of a VPS. They have preconfigured server builds for a bunch of different applications which can save you a bunch of time. They have several different options hosted out of Sydney.

   **They have a 3 day free trial BUT if you use the coupon code FASTHOSTING they'll give you $25 free credit so nearly 3 months free on the base plans**
   
   If you're running Wordpress or Woocommerce this is probably your best option

3. Vultr - Vultr high frequency servers are what we recommend if you want a more traditional VPS solution. The high frequency option has NVME disks and faster CPUs that their standard VPS. One other feature we love is that they have a huge range of different off the shelf Linux distros and applications they support right out of the box which can save a ton of time configuring a server from scratch. Their datacentre is in Sydney. Get $50 free credit using our link.
4. Linode - Linode now has a data centre in Sydney. Linode is similar to Vultr in that it's a true VPS solution but has a lot more flexibility in terms of how you can configure the server, storage and so forth.
5. Digitalocean - DigitalOcean is hosted out of Singapore so will typically be a better option if you have international traffic too or have a lot of Perth/WA traffic. Click the link to get $100 free credit!

NOTE: Some common advice you’ll see around the web is that if you want a high performance site you should run your site on a VPS, but this always the best advice. If you're running a specific application like Wordpress quite often a managed Wordpress host will be a better option that a dedicated server. If you're looking for a Wordpress host, take a look at our Fastest Wordpress Hosts article.

It's unfortunate that most people choose a hosting provider with price largely as the only selection criteria. That's pretty much the worst way to make a decision especially given the commercial impact poor quality hosting will have on a business.

Cost or price is obviously one of the considerations to look at when choosing a provider but that's really only one element of many. Below we’ve summarised some important areas to consider when choosing a virtual private server host.

OK so clearly if you're on this page you're probably looking for hosting in Australia - generally speaking the hosting should be in the country where the bulk of the visitors are located.

Quite often we see clients who are targeting a US market but are hosting in Australia or hosting in the US and targeting an Australia audience only.

It's important to take the geographic location of the server and visitors into account.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that, speed, performance and reliability are key when it comes to a hosting provider.

Your hosting needs to be well matched to the number of visitors you’re expecting and/or the amount of processing the server needs to do. Ideally you should have some capacity built into the server so peak periods.

Ultimately the web application(s) you're running on the box along with the average traffic load and peak traffic load are all important considerations to make when choosing a host.

Sidenote: if you're hosting a website it's worth testing the speed. We use tools.pingdom.com to test website speed. In an ideal world your site should be loading in under 1 second (this is where the load begins to feel instant). We also use uptimerobot.com to monitor site uptime - they have a free option that will check in 5 minute intervals and a paid option checking every 1 minute.

Scalability is important in some instances. If you're expecting performance requirements to grow over time you'll want to make sure you're on a host that is easily scalable. Some hosts just require a single click, several minutes and a reboot to scale - others can be a bit of an ordeal or just don't scale at all.

Do you need support and what is your expectation? Is online only support OK or do you want to be able to pickup the phone and call someone?

Who is looking after the server and do you want unmanaged or fully managed?

Like any piece of software your VPS will require patches and maintenance from time to time. Would you prefer the host takes care of this or are you going to do it yourself?

What is your backup strategy? Do you need the hosting provider to take care of this? Do you need offsite replication?

Generally it's not good enough to solely rely on the hosting provider's backup as problems and data loss DO happen. Even a moderately small server, site or webapp will have 100s if not 1000s of hours invested into it. Backups are a critical component of protecting that asset and investment.