Hosting is the server that stores your website and sends it to visitors. For a small Australian business, that should usually mean managed WordPress hosting on Australian servers, with daily backups kept off the server for 30 days or more, and business email run separately. It’s the bit of your website you never think about until it breaks. Then it’s the only thing you think about, usually at 9pm on a Sunday while your contact form throws errors and your host’s support queue says 48 hours.
In our experience, the slow, hacked or broken sites we’re asked to rescue usually have one thing in common: the hosting was chosen on price. Knowing what you’re paying for makes it much easier to choose well.
What hosting is
Your website is a set of files and a database. Hosting is the computer (a server) in a data centre that stores those files and sends them to people’s browsers when they visit. Your domain name, like yourbusiness.com.au, is just the address that points to that server. They’re separate things, often bought from separate companies, which is why it pays to know who you’re dealing with for each. Our guide to .com.au domain rules and renewals covers the domain side.
Shared hosting vs managed hosting
Shared hosting
Your site sits on a server with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of other websites, all sharing the same processing power and memory. It’s cheap because the cost is split so many ways.
It works fine for a tiny, low-traffic site. The problems start when a neighbour on the same server gets a traffic spike or gets hacked. Your site slows down or goes offline, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Support is usually a ticket queue staffed by people who look after thousands of customers and know very little about your WordPress setup.
Managed hosting
Managed WordPress hosting is set up specifically for WordPress sites, with fewer sites per server, server-level caching, automatic backups and security monitoring. Someone is actively looking after the server, rather than renting you space and leaving you to it.
Some managed hosting also includes keeping WordPress itself and the plugins updated. Some doesn’t. Check exactly what’s covered, because “managed” means different things to different hosts.
VPS and cloud servers
A virtual private server gives your site dedicated resources on a shared physical machine. Great for busy shops or complex sites, but someone has to configure and maintain it. Unless you’ve got a developer who’s taking that on, it’s more than most small businesses need.
Why server location matters
If your customers are in Australia, your website should be hosted in Australia. Data travelling from a server in the US to a phone in Ballina adds a delay to every request a page makes, and a modern page makes dozens of them. It’s a fraction of a second each time, but it adds up, especially on a patchy regional mobile connection.
You’ll see the difference in how fast the page starts to appear. Test your site in Google’s PageSpeed Insights and look at the server response time. A slow response is often the first clue the server is either overseas or overloaded. Our article on Core Web Vitals explains what those speed scores mean.
A content delivery network (CDN) can help by storing copies of your site’s images and files on servers around the world. It’s useful, but it doesn’t fully make up for a slow or distant main server.
Backups: what good looks like
Every host says they do backups. The questions to ask are:
- How often? Daily is the minimum for most sites. A busy shop needs more often.
- How long are they kept? If a hack is discovered three weeks after it happened, a backup history of seven days is useless. We’d want 30 days or more.
- Where are they stored? A backup on the same server as the website disappears if that server fails. Backups should be stored somewhere else.
- Who can restore them, and how fast? Can you click a button, or do you have to lodge a ticket and wait?
- Have they ever been tested? A backup that’s never been restored is a hope, not a plan.
Why email should often live separately
Plenty of cheap hosting packages throw in email accounts for free. It sounds convenient. It’s often a mistake.
When your email and website live on the same server, a problem with one takes down the other. If the site gets hacked and starts sending spam, the server’s address can end up on spam blacklists, and suddenly your quotes and invoices land in customers’ junk folders. If you change web hosts, your email has to move too, which is when things go missing.
For most businesses, we recommend running business email through Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and keeping the website hosting separate. You pay a small monthly fee per mailbox, and in return you get reliable delivery, proper spam filtering, calendars, and an email system that doesn’t care what happens to your website. If you’ve ever lost a day of enquiries during a website move, you’ll understand why.
The one thing that has to be right is your DNS settings, so the domain knows to send email to one place and website traffic to another. Get this wrong and email stops. It’s a five-minute job for someone who knows what they’re doing and an afternoon of panic for someone who doesn’t.
What cheap hosting really costs you
Bargain hosting is a false economy. The low monthly price is real. So are the costs that come with it:
- Slower pages. Visitors leave, and you’re paying for ads or SEO to bring them to a site that loads slowly.
- Downtime you don’t hear about. Most cheap hosts won’t tell you when your site was offline overnight.
- Hack clean-ups. Paying a developer to clean up a hacked site often costs more than several years of decent hosting.
- Renewal price jumps. Introductory prices often go up sharply at the first renewal.
- Upsells. SSL certificates, backups and “site security” sold as extras that better hosts include.
- Your time. Every hour on the phone to support is an hour not spent on the business.
Caching, image optimisation and a well-built site matter as much as the server itself. We explain how they fit together in WordPress caching in plain English. But you can’t cache your way out of a server that’s overloaded to begin with.
Questions to ask any host
Before you sign up or renew, get straight answers to these:
- Where are the servers physically located?
- How many sites share the server my site will be on?
- How often are backups taken, how long are they kept, and where are they stored?
- What happens if my site is hacked? Is clean-up included?
- Are SSL certificates included?
- What’s the renewal price, not just the first-year price?
- How do I contact support, and who actually answers?
- If I leave, can I take a full copy of my site with me?
The last one matters more than people expect. You should own your website and be free to move it.
Where we land
Hosting for the sites we build is $25 a month + GST, with care plans for updates and backups from $79 a month, and you still own the site and can move it any time. If you’re not sure what you’re on at the moment, our website ownership page explains how it works and offers a free review of your current setup. And if the hosting is the least of your site’s problems, our web design packages are the next place to look.