Best Web Hosting in Australia

Having been in the industry for well over a decade, hosting and building websites for clients as well as for our own projects, you’d be right to say we know a thing or two in creating and hosting sites. With our combined experience, we set out to analyze and review the best web hosting providers in Australia as part of our country-specific hosting providers. We recently reviewed hosting providers in Nigeria as well. We then merged our results to find the top 12 hosting providers in 2020.

Reviews of the best 12 Best Web Hosting in Australia

#1. HostPapa AU – Best Web Hosting in Australia

When it comes to value, HostPaPa AU is the best web hosting option for us Aussies. They boast quality hosting at much more affordable pricing than most of their competition for the Australian market. Armed with only AUD $2.95/month, HostPaPa gives you an account that offers you 2 sites with unlimited bandwidth, 100 GB storage, a free domain name, and a horde of free stuff like free site transfer if needed.

Their domain name registration will easily take care of your .com.au with a setup process that will check for the available domain names based on your keywords. 

Building a site with HostPaPa is super easy with their 1-click installer for every content management system like Joomla and WordPress (more than 400 apps in total).

Customer support in HostPaPa, unlike in most budget hosts, is available 24/7 on phone, live chat, as well as in support tickets. 

HostPaPa features a handful of hosting types including shared hosting (preferred by most people and is the cheapest), reseller hosting, and VPS hosting. They also offer web design services if you need them. 

HostPaPa is also outstanding in its performance, boasting a 99.9% uptime guarantee and integration with Cloudflare for free in case you intend to target a global market and not just Australia.

Considering the quality of the services they offer and the price at which they provide them, HostPaPa totally deserves to be featured at the top of this list. To top it all off, they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee with every subscription you make making their hosting service an absolute no-brainer.

Pros

• Plenty of free stuff
• Great 24/7 support
• 100 GB of disk space
• 30-day money-back guarantee
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Charges in AUD

Cons

• None

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#2. SiteGround AU – Runner up Web Hosting in Australia

Coming in second on our list, Siteground is an excellent hosting option for Australia though it is a tad more expensive than HostPaPa. Siteground’s pricing is however backed up by their excellent customer support with more options and they are also recommended by WordPress.

Aside from the fact that SiteGround uses SSD storage and features highly optimized server setups, they also have PowerCacher, a custom-built plugin for WordPress. PowerCacher boosts your site’s performance even further. However, it is only available on their GrowBig plan and those above it. 

SiteGround takes security a top priority and once again, they custom-built their security measures to ensure every server they host remains crystal clean. Though SiteGround is based in the US, speed is really not an issue as they feature some of the fastest servers in the world. If your target market is in Australia, Sydney is the one to choose from SiteGround. On the other hand, if your target market is global, you have to enable CDN integration with Cloudflare. It will serve as Cloudflare’s closest node to your site for your visitors, and to top it all off, it’s free!

SiteGround’s “StartUp” plan starts at AUD $6.99, which is their cheapest offering. 

Pros

• SSD storage
• 24/7 Technical support
• 30-day Money-Back Guarantee
• Daily Backups

Cons

• Renewal costs are significantly high

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#3. Crucial – Great Australian Green Website Hosting

Crucial offers the more expensive hosting option on our review. However, they do make up for it with usability and reliability. They are among the greenest web hosting Australian hosting firms and boasts all the features of a first-class host. For instance, they feature unlimited data transfers, great 24/7 customer support, and a generous 50 GB disk space.

When it comes to hosting, Crucial offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, WordPress hosting, and a handful of VPS hosting options. Like SiteGround and other decent web hosts, they also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, feature DDOS protection, and offer free SSL certificates. While crucial lacks servers abroad, they do offer a Cloudflare plugin to use Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN).

In addition, Crucial also offers to handle all your domain registration tasks and feature more advanced SSL certificates such as EV certificates.

The Cheapest plan on Crucial will cost you AUD $22.90, which in my opinion is fair for its features.

Pros

• It is an Australian host
• Excellent 24/7 Support
• Green Hosting

Cons

• No servers abroad
• Quite expensive

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#4. A2 Hosting – Best Reseller Hosting for Australia

For the better part of this decade, A2 Hosting has been competing with the biggest names in the web hosting industry, and it is very much justified to do so. It is also rated the best reseller hosting firm for Australia in our review today.

A2 Hosting boasts one of the most impressive features catalogs including SSD storage and free SSL certificates on every plan, unlimited bandwidth & storage, an anytime money-back guarantee on even their cheapest plan. And to top it all off, they have excellent 24/7 customer support and a custom web builder just in case you do not want to use WordPress, Joomla, or any of the other available builders.

A2 Hosting offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers. They also deal with domain registrations as well. 

It is also advantageous that A2Hosting has servers in Singapore; it makes the host perfect for hosting sites for the Australian market. Compared to SiteGround, A2Hosting is slightly lower on speed but they make up for this with unlimited disk space.

A2Hosting prices its cheapest plan at $3.92 and offers a single site, 25 email accounts, and one free site transfer if you are migrating from another host.

Pros

• Has a server in Singapore for Australian sites
• Anytime Money-back guarantee
• Free SSL
• Free SSD
• Unlimited Storage + Data Transfer

Cons

• Costs in USD

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#5. Hostinger – Great Affordable Web Host

In fifth place today, Hostinger comes as one of the most affordable web hosts for Australian webmasters. For as little as AUD $5 per month, Hostinger allows you to access its high-quality hosting with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, amazing customer support, life-time SSL for a fee, and multiple servers around the globe to choose from including in the US, UK, Lithuania, Indonesia, Netherlands, and Brazil.

The Hostinger Singapore server is great for hosting your site in Australia. You also get the option to enable Cloudflare’s CDN. If need be, you can ask Hostinger’s support to show you how to enable it, it is usually an easy one-time process.

Hostinger’s performance is also very impressive. They offer server-level caching, SSD storage, and their custom-built plugin to speed up WordPress hosted sites. Their site loading times are very impressive.

In their hosting plans, hosting offers shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting for those that require a lot of resources. 

Their support is available 24/7 all around the year with pretty impressive response times on their live chat and wide knowledge base to easily and conveniently guide you through solving the smaller issues.

Of the 3 hosting plans available on Hostinger, the most popular one costs only USD $2.89 per month.

Pros

• Very responsive support
• Features a Singapore server for Australian sites
• Offers a 30-day money-back guarantee
• High-quality hosting

Cons

• Costs in USD
• No servers in Australia

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#6. Digital Pacific – Great Australian Web Host

Being among the oldest hosting companies in Australia, Digital Pacific has had tons of experience in the industry and it is evident in its quality hosting services. Their hosting service is reliable as they aim to serve customers for the long haul. 

Some of the default features on Digital Pacific include free setup, ssh access, daily backups. And decent hardware. While their features are high-end, they are a tad more expensive than their competition, offering their basic plan at $9.90 per month. You will only get 1 GB of storage with the basic plan.

Digital Pacific has got it all when it comes to hosting options; from shared hosting, WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers, VPS, to domain registrations, as well as Gmail and office 365 email services.

Digital Pacific has its primary data center in Sydney but has no overseas servers like SiteGround and Hostinger.

Pros

• Australian web host
• Large catalog of hosting options to choose from
• Green hosting

Cons

• Quite expensive
• Has no server abroad

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#7. GreenGeeks – Best Green Web Hosting

GreenGeeks is popular for being one of the world’s greenest web hosting providers. That’s because they put 300% of their company’s consumed energy back into the grid. Today, they take first place in green web hosting solutions for us Australians. 

As a host, GreenGeeks offers shared hosting, reseller hosting, and WordPress Hosting. While they do not have a server in Australia, GreenGeeks’ servers are set up for high speed. Their security setup is also quite impressive with a multi-layered protocol that keeps everything running as it should.

For their basic plan, you will only need USD $3.95 per month, which is competitive compared to other US-based hosts. Their support is also very responsive and timely. 

Pros

• Very secure setup
• Super green hosting
• Very scalable
• Great site speeds

Cons

• Costs in USD
• They have no servers in Australia 

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#8. WPHosting – Best Australian WordPress Host

Coming in as the best Australian WordPress host WP hosting is primarily focused on WordPress hosting. It offers excellent speeds, coupled with automated backups and impressive security protocols.

As I mentioned earlier, WPhosting is centered on WordPress. WPhosting sets you up with instant WordPress installs immediately you sign up. Their servers use SSD’s and MariaDB with excellent WP support. WPhosting has been in the industry for well over a decade and they do their job with the professionalism it deserves. They have also worked on some major Australian sites over the years.

While their hosting plans are not all that cheap, they do offer excellent quality. They offer excellent security and offers daily backups so your data does not get lost. These guys are outstanding when it comes to making sure their clients have peace of mind.

Pros

• Australian firm
• WordPress hosting
• Very fast servers
• Daily backups
• DDOS protection

Cons

• It is only focused on WordPress
• Quite an expensive hosting option

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#9. BlueHost – Best Overseas Web Host for Beginners

Bluehost is comfortably among the most popular hosting providers in the world. They had however had a rough couple of years after the firm was acquired by EIG. However, Bluehost does seem to be bouncing back into the right track with their performance as well as support improving, and today it is among the best overseas web host for Australian beginner webmasters.

That said, they are still among the most experienced hosting providers offering all the standard hosting options such as shared hosting, WP hosting, cloud hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS. 

While Bluehost lacks any servers in Australia, they do provide Cloudflare integration, which should not be much of a fuss as it is quite straightforward to setup. 

Pros

• The company has a lot of experience
• Great with WordPress integration
• Offers competitive pricing

Cons

• Costs in USD
• Has no server in or near Australia
• Has a rocky history

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#10. Cloudways – Best Cloud Hosting

Cloudways is our best cloud hosting option for Australian websites. As the name gives away, Cloudways is focused on cloud hosting. Primarily, they scale everything by using other companies’ servers to deploy their apps. Cloudways works with giants like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Vultr. 

Cloudways boasts approximately 60 servers across the globe to choose from. While they might not be your usual hosting company, but they do offer great value for your money. Cloudways strength lays in their flexibility and scalability and they are aware of this fact, hence they keep their performance higher than most of their competitors by using some of the best providers around the globe. They also feature more extras such as aggressive caching options for Magento as well as WordPress. As a result, their site speeds are impressive. 

Pros

• Huge choice of providers to choose from
• Very fast site speeds
• Impressive response times by the support
• Very scalable

Cons

• Costs are in USD
• It is slightly more techie to setup

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#11. Kinsta

Kinsta was first built for WordPress by WordPress engineers in 2013. They are currently the best choice for Australian WordPress site owners looking for speed and reliability as this is where they excel. Kinsta was also built to work with Google Cloud exclusively, allowing websites to load much faster. In fact, Kinsta has received the Top Tier Award for Performance Benchmarks for the fifth year consecutively. 

With an environment that is optimized for speed, Kinsta is a well-managed hosting platform. That way, the platform takes the heavy lifting required in optimization, backups, and other functions that are critical to your site’s performance. With a 99.9% uptime guarantee, the platform demonstrates it has the ability to maintain respectable site speeds even with websites that require a lot of resources.

Kinsta is also very secure with 24/7 uptime monitoring, DDOS, firewall SSL authentication, and daily backups. You will also find a horde of technical advancement features with Kinsta. They offer access to the Australian market through CDN, providing 50GB per month with their basic plan. 

Kinsta is among the higher-priced options at USD $30 per month. 

Pros

• Excellent site speeds
• Automated management options
• 24/7 uptime monitoring
• Lots of servers to choose from

Cons

• Expensive

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#12. Amazon AWS

Last but not least, Amazon AWS is among Australia’s best cloud hosting options. Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing services firm or an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. Being a subsidiary of Amazon, Amazon AWS is by default a popular name with an excess of $300 billion. It is even larger than IBM, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Its services are also way broader than standard shared hosting and registration of domain names. AWS also sells products like virtual reality tools, gaming technologies, machine learning applications, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud hosting. 

Amazon AWS features manually configured backups, a CDN, spam protection, and many more features configured to seamlessly work with AWS. 

With a profound uptime service-level agreement (SLA) on WPA, the client can enjoy 99.99% uptime with compensation guaranteed if you experience any downtime. AWS excels in cloud hosting for their scalable resources. That means there are no sudden spikes in data or traffic. What’s more, you will be billed on what you use.

Support on AWS is also topnotch. The free basic plans on the platform come with 24/7 ticket-based customer support, support forums, and documentation. Paid plans come with a handful of one-on-one support from email to technical account management and assigned support concierge.

In terms of price, Amazon AWS is one of the cheaper options. However, clients here are billed on the number of resources they actually use. However, their plans range between $4 and $240. Additionally, they offer a free tier plan that offers an EBS and EC2 to host one website for a year for free with the limit of 30 GB storage.

Pros

• Very Scalable
• Outstanding site uptime
• Billed on used resources
• Large company with many resources
• One of the cheaper options

Cons

• Backups are not automated

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Types of Australian Web Hosting

The type of web hosting service you need is dictated by the type of website you intend to operate. This includes whether or not you will have resource-heavy features on your website such as e-commerce, directories, forums, etc. Below are the types of web hosting available in Australia.

Shared Hosting

As its name suggests, shared hosting is a type of web hosting that allows your website to share space and resources on the same server in Australia with a handful of other sites. This type of web hosting is usually on the cheapest plans with most hosting companies. That’s because the hosting company can easily cover the costs of a server by splitting it up for multiple users. 

Shared hosting comes with its own set of disadvantages including security risks, limited resources, and lack of flexibility enough to install your custom apps. However, it comes highly recommended for small businesses and startups, blogs, etc.  That’s on account of the fact that you won’t have to worry about server maintenance and other tedious duties.

VPS

Virtual Private Servers in essence work similarly to dedicated servers within a shared hosting system. For a fraction of the cost, it would take to set up a dedicated server, VPS partitions a physical server and gives you access to one of the isolated parts just as you would in a dedicated server though less powerful. 

You get dedicated RAM, CPU, and even SSD storage in some hosting options. Granted full root access to your virtual server, it offers an excellent opportunity to run custom apps on one of the cheaper web hosting options. Moreover, with VPS, the traffic on a neighbor’s server does not affect the performance of your site.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Reserved for websites that need high-performance servers, dedicated server hosting is often used by large eCommerce sites, massive forums, real estate directories, etc. While they pack a very strong and swift approach, they are also equally expensive. For maximum stability, the best support, and 100% uptime, dedicated server hosting is the best option for you. 

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is my personal favorite web hosting option. It utilizes multiple machines as a single system and its potential is determined by the number of machines you can chain together. The biggest advantage of cloud hosting is that there is little chance for serious downtimes because it uses multiple machines hence in case one shuts off, the rest will just become slightly slower. What’s more, with cloud hosting you can easily scale up or scale down as your website’s needs grow or reduce. 

Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is often used by web designers or web agencies that are looking to offer their hosting services to a clientele. Instead of letting their clients signup for a random host, they bulk buy hosting services then sell it to their clients, deploy/migrate the client’s site, then just charge them on a monthly basis. Reseller hosting is a pretty standard practice that allows the web designer to have more control of their clients’ sites. 

WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is really all about giving peace of mind to bloggers and site owners that do not really want to deal with the technical nature of maintaining and running a WordPress Site. 

WordPress hosting is an all-in-one service that includes regular backups, specific security, WP core updates, automated plugins, no downtime, specialized WordPress support, and excellent performance among many more. It is, however, significantly more expensive than your average shared hosting service.  That said, it is perfect for bloggers or businesses that run medium to larger websites and lack the technical know-how to deal with potential issues. 

Features to look for when looking for a good web hosting option

The main features to watch out for when researching web hosting options are the ease of use, performance/ speed, and support. 

Ease of Use

Most web hosts have polished up on this feature, the majority of them featuring standard and custom control panels to make it easy for the webmaster to deploy and manage sites.

Speed/Performance

The speed of a hosting option is determined by a couple of factors, and not simply the location of the servers. While most people think that a hosting company must have its data centers in Australia to feature high speed in Australia, this is not true.

Support

Some hosting firms prefer to have in-house support services while others prefer to outsource. Most people may think that in-house support services are better, but for most hosting firms, this is not the case.

Website hosting providers that outsource their customer support actually have better response times and their support scalable when the servers are down. In-house support is usually much smaller and is not that dependable in critical situations.

Nate R. Reiner

My name is Nate Reiner and I am the editor here at 10Webtools. I have 8 years of experience using 50+ different web tools ranging from podcast, web hosting, email marketing, and much more. I previously managed a team offering support services to a large conglomerate that utilized tens of software solutions. I now run this blog full-time and when I am not reviewing or testing software, I enjoy riding bikes and supporting my clients achieve internet success. You can reach me directly at [email protected]