Not all hosting is created equally

If you have a website then you've no doubt heard about "hosting" but you might not know much about it, apart from the fact you pay some company every month or year for it.

Well without hosting your website wouldn't work. Hosting is basically a service that runs on a power computer (server) and it's what makes your website accessible on the Internet.

While it might sound like it's not a very complicated service, it certainly is an important one, and not all hosting companies are the same. Like most things in like you get what you pay for. You can get cheap hosting for $2 a month in the US, but your website will be on a server that's probably over crowded - which means it'll run slow - you most likely won't get much support when you need it, and the site will be hosted in the US. You can also get hosting that will cost you hundreds per month - something for every need and budget.

Hosting location is also important for speed and reliability. If the people accessing your website are in Australia by hosting in the US (or any other country) it means that in order to view your site the traffic is travelling around the world and back again just to display your site, where as if your site is hosted locally in Australia its traffic is travelling a lot less, meaning your site will be faster - Google will like it better too.

Five or six years ago there was a lot of good quality hosting companies in Australia and I could recommend half a dozen to anyone who asked, but since then 2 of the biggest hosting companies (Netregistry and MelbourneIT) merged (technically I think Netregistry bought MelbourneIT) and have been on a shopping spree buying all the good hosting companies - and to be blunt, ruining them with reduced service and botched migrations.

These days there are only 2 companies I'd recommend - VentraIP and Digital Pacific. (Update June 2021 - VentraIP is the only one I'd recommend now!)

Over at Mity we run our own hosting servers so that we can provide our clients with a high quality managed hosting service, and because we only host our clients we have much higher levels of security.

If you want to chat all things hosting, or have any questions feel free to get in contact with me.