If a WordPress website is a critical part of your business and income, there are two things essential to it performing at it’s best. Expert WordPress help for updates, fixes and improvements is one. The other is a quality WordPress hosting solution.

Your hosting company will provide the servers (basically computers for hosting websites) that allow people to view your website.

There are so many web hosting companies out there, that it can be really difficult to understand the differences between them and exactly which one you should pick. Choosing the wrong WordPress hosting means you risk a slow website, frequent downtime or frustrating support.

 

We are going to make choosing an Australian hosting company for your website easy!

Since we don’t place restrictions on where our clients host their websites, we’ve had experience with the majority of local Australian hosting companies and the major players offshore as well.

I’m frequently asked who we use for hosting our WordPress websites and who we recommend. But first I want to give you a few tips on choosing a WordPress hosting company, which is basically our criteria for recommending them.

If you want to jump ahead and see our list of the best Australian hosting for WordPress click below…

 

TAKE ME STRAIGHT TO THE WINNERS!

 

How to Choose the best WordPress Hosting

Customer Support Quality

What happens when you need support? It’s a little hard to know how helpful a hosting company is before you become a customer.

When choosing a Hosting company for WordPress it’s a good idea to read online reviews. Get a better feel by contacting them to see how they treat you as a prospective customer. Most hosting companies have 24/7 email support, but how quickly and painlessly you get your questions and issues resolved varies considerably!

We’ve done the homework for you on this. We’ve been in touch with all the recommended hosting companies support staff and had consistent positive experiences with short wait times. They’ve also had great feedback from our customers. The quality of local support from these providers is one of the top reasons why we recommend them.

Hosting Location

Where you host your website matters. Choosing a local Australian hosting company rather than hosting off-shore minimises any delay in your website load times for Australian visitors. So don’t handbrake your WordPress website speed with off shore hosting companies. All our recommended hosting companies have servers located in Sydney, Melbourne, or both.

Backup and Recovery

If your whole business is online, one of the worst things that can happen is your website crashing and needing to be recovered. Any reputable hosting company takes backups of your account as part of their disaster recovery plan. How frequent and accessible those backups are will vary. Some hosting companies don’t give you access and will charge you to restore a backup!

The recommended WordPress hosts here all have regular (off-site) backups you can access and restore yourself at any time.

Hosting Performance

We touched on website speed when talking about hosting location. The performance of your server is also important. As you can imagine, we work on website speed day in and day out. Hosting companies with slow servers were not considered at all.

Downtime is another aspect of performance. No hosting company has 100% uptime. Facebook, Netflix and the Wall Street Journal have all had downtime in the last 12 months to name a few. The key here is how well hosting companies communicate with their clients and the speed of fixes.

Cpanel vs Plesk vs WordPress hosting, what’s the difference?

Each hosting company will have server level software for things like taking a manual website backup, managing email accounts and accessing your website files and database. CPanel is an industry leading software application to manage standard web hosting accounts, and you’ll see it with most hosting plans in Australia.

Plesk is it’s nearest competitor and actually dominates in Europe. With a recent focus on the WordPress platform, it’s becoming a preferred option for WordPress hosting services, although some have built their own custom WordPress hosting control panels.

So…What is WordPress hosting exactly?

Here’s the difference. While traditional CPanel hosting services support WordPress, their servers also must cater for other content management systems, email and other applications. WordPress hosting is essentially specialised hosting that runs nothing but WordPress websites. That means servers can be configured for the optimal performance of WordPress.

What does that mean for you? WordPress hosting will have servers security hardened for level optimised caching for speed. Improved security from . Additionally most plans have staging sites and the option of automatic updates for WordPress, core and plugins (for available updates in the WordPress dashboard).

While you can host email on regular servers, that’s not the case for WordPress optimised servers. You will need to purchase either G-Suite or Office 365 to host your email.

The Best WordPress Hosting in Australia 2019

There are currently only 5 Australian hosting companies that meet our requirements for quality hosting services. From our experience choosing the best hosting package for your website from the providers below will minimise the the risk of hosting transfer regret!

 

Dream IT Host Review (Winner Best CPanel Hosting For WordPress)

When it comes to powerful yet affordable hosting for WordPress, Dream IT Host tick all the boxes for us.

fastest wordpress hosting

An independant benckmarking study found their Business Web Hosting plan to be the fastest WordPress hosting in Australian around the $20 price point.

With 50GB NVMe storage and 6GB RAM + 300% CPU, there’s plenty of room and power under the hood, that’s for sure!

Australia based support is available via email, live chat or phone. Free website migrations are now a common feature of hosting companies, but Dream IT Host claim they can transfer your website and email for free within hours.

DreamIT Host operates servers in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Singapore. Their servers use NVMe based storage. That’s the next level on SSD storage, running 12x faster for optimal website performance. Hourly backups are accessible in the control panel.

Free SSL certificates, Imunify360 Malware scanning, the list goes on. This makes Dream IT Host our number one pick for CPanel WordPress hosting in Australia.

View Hosting Plans >>

 

Digital Pacific Hosting Review (Winner Best WordPress Hosting Provider)

We’ve had websites using Digital Pacific CPanel hosting for WordPress since 2012.

best wordpress hostingThe local support team have been exceptional anytime we’ve reached out for help and we regularly hear similar comments from clients hosted with them. Environmentally minded, Digital Pacific provides carbon neutral Australian hosting solutions.

Digital Pacific’s WordPress hosting plans stand out for value and configuration. Servers are specifically optimised to give you the ideal technical specifications and conditions for running WordPress smoothly and securely.

Like Dream IT Host, Digital pacific have invested in Imunify360 Malware scanning for your website security.

WordPress hosting prices start from only $16.90 per month. At $44.90 per month you get 50GB SSD storage, the option of hosting two websites on the same account, 4GB RAM and 400% CPU.

Built with Plesk, you can create staging websites in a couple of clicks to test updates before going live. Backups are automated daily R1Soft backups which can be easily accessed via the Plesk dashboard. For your email hosting Digital Pacific recommend G-Suite and are G Suite Authorised Resellers.

View Hosting Plans >>

 

Other Top Australian Hosting Companies

These hosting companies all rate a mention as good quality hosting for WordPress in Australia.

Crucial Hosting Review (CPanel Hosting & WordPress Hosting Provider)

crucial hosting reviewFounded in 2003, Crucial Hosting in Sydney are another great performer when it comes to customer support and reliable hosting. In fact Crucial has been recognised for customer service excellence at the Australian Business Awards.

A full range of hosting from shared CPanel hosting to dedicated servers and WordPress hosting are available to suit any Australian website.

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VentraIP Hosting Review (CPanel Hosting For WordPress)

ventraip hosting reviewWe also have hosting accounts with VentraIP in Melbourne. VentraIP’s hosting offers great value when it comes to price vs performance starting from $8.95/month with 2G RAM and 5GB of SSD storage.

VentraIP’s acceptable use policy (AUP) doesn’t allow storage of website backups on your account, but they do run hourly backups automatically. This allows you to restore backups from the previous 30 days.

View Hosting Plans >>

 

WP Engine Hosting Review (WordPress Hosting Provider)

WP Engine Hosting ReviewWP Engine hosting is a global leader in managed WordPress hosting. Built on the Google Cloud Platform, servers are located in Sydney and many locations across the world.

WP Engine hosting prices are higher than the other hosting companies listed (starting at $35USD/month) but this comes with a number of added perks. Their hosting is optimised for WordPress with their own caching system (called EverCache) and global CDN.

Solid WordPress security and DDOS protection is backed by a free hack cleanup guarantee.

One of my favourite features of WP Engine hosting is the 1 click staging site for WordPress where you can test changes and updates to your website away from the live site.

If you are a CPanel hosting user then the WP Engine dashboard will look a bit different but quickly become familiar. There’s no file manager, so accessing WordPress files is done with SFTP access using a tool like filezilla.

Daily or on demand website backups are available with a neat interface. G suite and Office 365 are recommended for email hosting with WP Engine managed WordPress hosting plans.

They have a local support team in Brisbane who can quickly respond to any issues and even scale your hosting during traffic spikes!

View Hosting Plans >>

 

Panthur Hosting Review (CPanel Hosting For WordPress)

panthur hosting reviewAnytime one of our clients talks to me about Panthur hosting, they rave about the support received.

Panthur also have a good range of plans, from cheap hosting for those just starting out (As little as $5 per month!) to high performance hosting options.

R1soft backups mean you can restore your own backups with a 30 day history.

View Hosting Plans >>

 

How do I transfer my website to new hosting?

To change web hosting companies you must:

  1. Sign up for a new website hosting plan.
  2. Transer a copy of your website files and database to your new hosting server.
  3. Check that all pages on the new copy of your website are identical to your current website.
  4. Change your nameservers or DNS records to point to your new web hosting server.
  5. After 24 hours, your domain name should be point to your new hosting server, usually much faster.
  6. Test that everything is working and performing as expected.
  7. Cancel your old web hosting package.

The recommended hosting providers will transfer your website files and email for you when you purchase a new hosting account, taking care of that step for you.

Conclusion

Before moving hosting it’s best to chat with your WordPress developers and the hosting company to ensure you start off on the right plan for your needs. By choosing from the best WordPress hosting Australia has to offer, you not only support a local business but you can be confident you’ll have high reliability and great support when you need it.