Most WordPress website hosting reviews are written by authors (often with little or no technical knowledge) with one objective: to earn a commission based on referring you to a website host.
This article reviews two Australian hosting companies – two companies that I trust and actually use as a web designer and developer. Yes, I’ll receive a tiny commission if you decide to use one of these companies, but this doesn’t increase the cost of hosting to you (and hey, at least I’m up front about it!).
[box] Since 2010 hosting of deanwormald.com has been taken care of by Host Geek.
My high traffic travel site japantravelmate.com is happily hosted with Crucial.[/box]
For well over decade I’ve used many hosting companies, from the $2-a-month hosts to those costing several thousand dollars a month. The two businesses above are my go-to hosts for holding my client websites. So let’s look at these two hosts in more detail…
Host Geek
Cheap hosting for personal and small business use
Host Geek is an Australian business offering lots of different hosting packages. I use it to host this website you’re on right now. I also refer many of my web design clients to Host Geek. Here’s why they are a great option if you’re looking for cheap hosting:
- Hosting starts from just $5.50 a month, and includes:
- 400MB of storage: plenty for a small blog or a small business website (upgrading is easy if you need more space).
- cPanel with Installatron: simple no-code WordPress installation.
- 100 email accounts: plenty of custom email addresses.
- 10 databases: which equals 10 WordPress/MySQL database installations.
- 10 add-on domains: you can host the websites for up to 10 different domain names on the one host.
Host Geek are based in Melbourne and their data center is located in Melbourne. The data center is where the actual physical hard drives are located which store a website. Having a data center in Australia is beneficial for local business SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), as Google and other search engines can see that you are based in Australia and most likely, your content is relevant to Australians.
Speed test results from a site hosted with Host Geek
I’ve always been very happy with the speed my site runs at with Host Geek. A speed test confirms it…
[button link=”http://deanwormald.com/visit/hostgeek/” color=”red” newwindow=”yes”] Learn more: Host Geek website hosting[/button]
Crucial
Fast hosting for high traffic & business critical sites
Crucial is an Australian hosting provider based in Sydney. I’ve been with Crucial since 2014, as the popularity of my japantravelmate.com started to grow, reaching tens of thousands of visitors a month.
Crucial’s hosting is rock solid. The servers use superfast SSD storage. Support is awesome. The best thing is that everything with Crucial is just so simple.
- Hosting is $20 a month and includes:
- 50GB of storage: more than enough for almost any website.
- cPanel with Softaculous: enabling code-free, easy WordPress installation
- Unlimited data transfer: no worries about bandwidth!
- Unlimited email accounts: go crazy with custom email addresses!
- 20 databases: up to 20 WordPress or MySQL database installations. With Crucial’s control panel, you can install loads of different applications with a click of a button – most use a MySQL database.
- 10 add-on domains: enabling you to store and host 10 different websites under different domain names.
Speed test results from a site hosted with Crucial
Below is a speed test performed on a page hosted by Crucial.
Important notes:
- This page has more than double the requests than deanwormald.com
- The page is more than 3 times larger than the page on deanwormald.com
- Some of the requests are on slow external servers that aren’t mine (i.e. for plugins)
- There are no cache optimisation plugins enabled (e.g. W3 Total Cache)
- … even with all this, it loads as fast as a page that is 3 times smaller!
[button link=”http://deanwormald.com/visit/crucial/” color=”red” newwindow=”yes”] Learn more: Crucial website hosting[/button]