Selecting a web hosting company is the first step to setting up your website and is the first expense that you will incur. Combined with this is the task of choosing your domain name (the address of your website e.g. peweb.com.au). Must hosting companies also provide a service for you to choose and pay for a domain name.
There are lots of web hosting companies out there, and choosing the right company can be daunting – it is always a balance of price, performance and service. I will work with any web hosting company that you select. But if you don’t know where to start, following are some web hosting companies that I have used either used and I have found to be good, or they are globally recognised as quality web hosting companies.
Hostinger
Hostinger is one of the big global web hosting companies, and they have very cheap plans with great features and a good renewal price. I have used Hostinger for a few projects and it is my favourite hosting company, due to it’s pricing, features and performance. The price for the entry level hosting is US$2.99 per month for a 4-year term with 2 months free when you sign up – that worked out to AU$218 for 4 years and 2 months for the last hosting contract that I signed up. The renewal price is currently US$7.99 per month. This gives you the following features:
- Standard Performance
- 100 Websites
- 100 GB SSD Storage
- Weekly Backups
- Unlimited Free SSL
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Free Email
They have a web hosting management panel (hPanel) that has good functionality, and I have found that when I contacted support on the online chat about a problem their responses were excellent. I have never had a performance problem with them – you can set the country that you want to use as the hosting centre, and I use their Asia Pac centre in Indonesia.
Domain name registration is US$9 for the first year if you want a ".au" domain name - their "free" domain names are only free for one year, and they don't allow you to choose .au, and they are very expensive in subsequent years.
One trick that I have found is that when the WordPress software is installed you get the Hostinger plugin which gave me php problems - so I delete that plugin.
Ventra IP
Ventra IP are an Australian company that have very good reviews, but they are more expensive than the global hosting providers listed in this article. However, I was doing some work with an Australian organization that had some very specific Australian domain name requirements that were not supported by the global hosting companies, so they chose Ventra. I have found their site security and other features to be very good, and the times that I have chatted with their support staff I have had to wait in the queue for a long time, but when I did get to chat with someone they were always very knowledgeable and able to resolve my question/issue quickly. So I am happy with Ventra and would recommend them if you need an Australian hosting company.
Other global ISPs
Two other global hosting providers who regularly feature in recommendations are BlueHost and Hostgator. However I have not used either of those companies so cannot comment based on my experience.
Who not to use
Crazy Domains
Crazy Domains are an Australian hosting company that is owned by a Singapore based company. I used them for one project, and their staff were always pleasant and very polite, and as long as you didn’t ask them any tricky questions them all was good. However, the website that I was working on was hacked very badly (it ended up with 2.4m fake pages according to Google Search Console), and as I worked through the website configuration, I found a significant number of security vulnerabilities that Crazy Domains had allowed to become embedded over a number of years and had done nothing about. When asked about each of the vulnerabilities they either didn’t answer questions, or deflected, or said that it wasn’t their responsibility. In the end I had to delete every file and folder on the site to get rid of the vulnerabilities, then fix the configuration of the SSL provider. It became very clear that the security configuration of Crazy Domains servers is totally inadequate. The organisation that I was doing the work for then contracted with a different hosting provider, so we abandoned the Crazy Domains contract and moved to the new hosting provider.