Website Hosting

Choosing the right Website Hosting

Website Hosting is the often overlooked factor in SEO and online success.  As Google increases the emphasis on site speed, the choice of website host becomes ever more important.

Australian Website Hosting

For Australian Small Businesses whose target market is predominately in Australia, choosing a hosting company that uses Australian Based servers is critical.  Put simply, if all else is equal, loading website files from an Australian Server is always going to be faster for a user in Australia than loading files from the USA because of distance.  Of course the key thing here is that the servers also have to be of equal speed.

For Australian businesses that collect any customer financial information that is stored online, having the servers in Australia is a legal obligation as well.

Shared Hosting

For most small business websites shared hosting is perfectly acceptable and much cheaper than a VPS or private server.  Not all shared hosting is equal though.

Shared hosting simply means that your website files are stored on a server that is shared with other websites.  Things start to go wrong though when the hosting company gets greedy and tries to store too many sites on a single server.  The potential problems include:

• More sites mean more visitors at a given time which can slow down all of the websites on the server
• Overburdened servers are often the result of "cheap" hosting.  When a company offers "unlimited hosting for $3 per month" they need more sites per server to make a profit.  Cheap hosting attracts spammers and scammers who often jump from cheap host to cheap host as their sites are blocked.  This impacts the reputaion of the server ip address.
• The more sites on the server, the more likely another site owner will do something that gets the server ip address flagged as a source of spam.  This means your emails can get blocked even though you are not the guilty party.

Fortunately good quality shared hosting is not expensive starting at around $160 per year.  When compared to the value of the website you are hosting and the potential damage to your reputation from low quality hosting there really is no reason why you would choose low quality hosting.