Best Web Hosting Australia
(MARCH 2023 Update)

In our opinion the best web hosting companies in Australia for the most common types of websites are:

• Siteground
• A2 Hosting
• HostPapa
• Hostinger

They provide fast hosting with good security and great customer support whilst still being affordable to the average website owner. Our reviews above go into more detail about the pros and cons for each provider and hopefully will help you find an affordable web hosting solution.

If we had to pick one web host then it would be Siteground.

Ideally if you can afford to choose a hosting company that has an Australian based data centre then that will definitely help with your website speed, which in turn will help with your website SEO. If you can’t afford an Australian based web host then don’t worry, there are other things you can do to speed up your website such as using a CDN, adding additional website caching and implementing other forms of website speed optimisation such as lazy loading images and script optimisations which can be done using plugins if you are using a CMS like WordPress. 

If we’re being technically correct, the concept of hosting a website “in Australia” does mean it should be hosted in an Australian Data Centre. Therefore the cheapest web hosting in Australia would be from Siteground, whose prices start at $2.99 per month if you happen to get their black Friday deal. 

Generally speaking small business websites will use shared hosting to keep the costs down, therefore providers like Siteground, Hostinger, HostPapa & A2 Hosting are all great options as they provide the small business website owner with everything they need –  intuitive user dashboards, one-click installs for popular applications, good support, security and fast baseline server speeds. 

So when we talk about a truly Australian Web Hosting service we are talking about companies whose web hosting is operated entirely within Australia. There are a lot of options if you want an Australian based web hosting company but you generally either pay more to get the same level or quality or you sacrifice on quality. Our pick of the Australian web hosting providers would be Crucial. 

The best hosting for beginners are those that have an intuitive dashboard experience and great support. If you plan to build your website with a content management system like WordPress then you must choose a host with a one-click installer and a simple process for adding an SSL certificate to your website with the ability to force SSL. A hosting company like Siteground does this really well. 

When considering SEO as part of your hosting choice there are 2 main factors we would suggest as being important – Server Speed & Data Centre Location. If your business is based in Australia and targeting Australian customers then it would be great to choose a hosting provider with an Australian Data Centre if you can afford it. Server Speed is probably the most important overall, so if you can’t afford to go with a company that hosts in Australia then choose the fastest web hosting provider from the overseas options. 

When considering which type of hosting is the best for your website it comes down to what type of website you are operating and what objectives you are trying to balance. The most common types of hosting are:

• Shared Hosting
• WordPress Optimised Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Dedicated Hosting
• Cloud Web Hosting

For users who are running a standard informational website and your number of visitors is less than 1,000 per month, Shared Hosting is perfectly suitable. If you have higher traffic levels and you have the budget for it, then upgrading to a one of the other hosting types will improve speed and user experience. 

When you are running an e-commerce website then shared hosting is not really optimal for scalability so you’d be better to choose a WordPress Optimised Hosting if you are using WordPress or perhaps a VPS type option. 

VPS Hosting & Dedicated Hosting are more typically used for Enterprise websites. 

Probably the most significant change in choosing a web hosting in 2022 is the increased focus on Core Web Vitals if you’re considering ranking in search engines like Google. This wasn’t as important a couple of years ago but it has become very apparent that if you want to rank you need to appease the CWV God. 

As a result web hosting server speed has definitely become more important than ever, so whatever you do, make sure to choose one of the fastest web hosts within your budget. 

Yes, there are a number of companies that offer free web hosting in Australia but we don’t recommend it. When you compare what is included with companies like 000webhost.com in their free hosting plan versus their paid plans, you can see their free plans are very restricted and you will likely encounter resource limit issues, if not from the outset, in the near future. Given how many cheap hosting services there are to choose from we think it is definitely worth spending the small amount of money to ensure you have a minimum level of quality in your hosting plan. 

Typically you will purchase a domain name such as yourdomainname.com.au through a registered domain name retailer. You then need to host that domain somewhere in order to use it for sending and receiving emails and/or operating a website. Domain Hosting (DNS Hosting) is a system that holds a set of records that designates where emails should be routed to for your domain name and also where users should be routed to in order to visit your website. 

So if you intend to operate both emails and a website using your domain name you will need domain hosting, web hosting and email hosting.  

This is a common question we receive from our clients and in our opinion we feel that cloud hosted email services such as Google Workspace & Office365 provide superior spam filtering. Given they are hosted independently of your website, this setup also allows for better website portability, meaning that if you want to change web hosting companies you don’t have the hassle of having to migrate your the emails on your server also which can be quite tedious for the non-technical user. 

The acronym CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and is basically a group of connected servers, often spread out all over the world. Their purpose is to optimise the speed at which users can access your web content. A service like Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDNs available. 

Google is primarily a search engine and not a web host, but they do offer a website building platform known as Google Sites or via your Google Business Profile. The issue with these platforms is that it does not allow you to use your own custom domain name, it will always be housed on a subdomain of Google. 

From our testing we believe that Cloudways is the fastest web host in Australia. Now their pricing is on the higher side but you definitely get what you pay for. If you don’t have the budget or aren’t willing to spend the money on Cloudways we would recommend Siteground as the fastest web host amongst the cheaper options available. 

GoDaddy are a juggernaut and are one of those domain and hosting companies that do best job of marketing on the planet. Is GoDaddy hosting any good though? From our experience in working with clients who have sites hosted on GoDaddy we believe there are much better options available. We have personally found their standard shared hosting to be quite slow for WordPress websites. The user interface for their dashboard also leaves quite a lot to be desired as it is very busy and certain features are non-intuitive. 

You most certainly can host your own website but you need to be aware of the requirements for doing so. In order to become your own web host you need to either know how to or learn to set up web server software on your computer. You must ensure your computer is always turned on as users will be connecting directly to your computer to download your website files to their browser. One other thing to note is that you need to check whether your Internet Service Provider has any bandwidth limitations that may prevent you from using your internet connection for hosting your website. 

We often get asked about Crazy Domains as a hosting provider and while we definitely recommend then as a great company to purchase your domain through, our past experience with their hosting products has been lacklustre. Every site I have encountered that was hosted on Crazy Domains had slow page load speed. 

As a developer I found my experience with their customer support team very frustrating as they seem to have a set script for their replies to questions around site speed. 

When testing with Google’s Pagespeed tool we found there was a slow server response time. We had already completed all the standard optimisations so we knew the issue was at the hosting server level but their support continued to insist the issue was with WordPress. I personally would not recommend hosting your website or emails through Crazy Domains as they are not a specialist hosting company.