Below you’ll find the list of our website hosting plans, features, pricing and ordering information. If you’re ready to order now, scroll down and click the Buy button and follow the checkout process.

If you’re not sure how to decide on a hosting plan, please continue reading through the “How to choose a hosting plan?” section further down the page. If you haven’t reviewed your website hosting service in a while this page also acts as a great quick audit with questions to ask your existing provider.

Many business owners don’t have a complete understanding of how website hosting actually works and the four core components that make up “hosting” in your business. If you’re interested in learning more about hosting, check out this blog article that explains the 4 components of your website hosting.

If there’s anything we’ve missed on this page or you have questions about our hosting packages head to the Contact Us page and drop us a line.

Hosting Plans

• Website Hosting

  Choose your plan

• Basic

  Best for tight budgets

  $319

  / year
  • Managed Daily Offsite Backups

  Buy now

• Business

  Suits most businesses

  $550

  / year
  
  • Managed Daily Backups
  • Managed Wordpress Patches & Updates
  • Business Grade Firewall Protection
  • Optional Cloudflare Website Accleration
  • High Speed Content Delivery Network (CDN)

  Buy now

• Premium

  For ecommerce &
  high traffic, mission
  critical sites

  $1295

  / year.
  • Managed Daily Backups
  • Managed Wordpress Patches & Updates
  • Business Grade Firewall Protection
  • Cloudflare Premium Website Accleration
  • High Speed Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • SSL Security Certificate
  • Dedicated IP Address
  • Realtime Offsite Backups

  Buy now

Our Business and Premium plans include migration of your website to our hosting platform.

How to choose a hosting plan?

Not all hosting is created equal and unfortunately most businesses choose a hosting provider based on price. As we move deeper and deeper into the web enabled world, your website is becoming an increasingly more important part of your business.

In many businesses the web is now the primary source of new customers, sales and new business so its important you make the right choice when it comes to your hosting. Making this important decision based on price is a false economy as even a few hours of downtime could now potentially cost you thousands or even tens of thousands in lost revenue.

Below we’ve summarised some key questions to ask when choosing a hosting provider for your website.

Questions to ask:

Backups – are they happening? How often?

If you have an ecommerce website then changes probably happen daily or hourly (new orders are changes!) so you’ll need realtime backup, in other words changes are backed up as they happen or within a few minutes of happening.

If you’re like most businesses you’ll probably update the site a few times a month and in that case a daily backup is probably what you need. Regardless of how often changes are made you need at least some regular backup of your site as problems do happen.

Backups are more important than you think and often backup problems are only discovered when you actually need to use your backup. A few years ago nearly 5000 small business websites disappeared when Australian hosting company Distribute IT was hacked. If these business owners had taken proactive measures to make sure they had website backups the hack would have been mostly a non-event and while inconvenient, these businesses wouldn’t be facing a website rebuild from scratch.

Also important to make the distinction between onsite and offsite backups. Onsite backups are backups made to the same physical or server location. This means they won’t protect you against all threats or risks like hacking or fire damage to the servers. Offsite backups are backups that are made to an offsite location and provide a higher level of protection. Unless explicitly stated, hosting backups are generally onsite.

Security, SSL Certificates & Firewalls – do you need high security or are you taking orders online?

If you’re an ecommerce website you’ll likely need an SSL certificate to encrypt credit card details when customers make an order. This allows your website to run in secure HTTPS mode.

You probably don’t realise that most website hosting doesn’t sit behind a real firewall. By real firewall I mean a network device than scans network traffic for threats as the traffic is flowing through and can block these threats as they happen.

Again as we’re moving deeper in the web enabled world, hacked websites are becoming very common occurrence. Recently WordPress was targeted in a widespread attack and poor security setup left many WordPress sites vulnerable to attack. Real firewall protection in conjunction with stronger server and hosting security meant sites on our premium plans were completely immune to this attack.

What CMSes or types of website do you support?

Our hosting packages are designed for WordPress websites. If you want to host a different CMS such as Magento, please head to the contact us page and drop us an email before ordering.

Is anyone installing the patches and updates for WordPress or your CMS?

Your website CMS is a piece of software just like the Mac OSX or Windows software that your desktop or laptop runs on. Like any software, your CMS needs security patches and updates to ensure you’re fully protected from threats and bugs.

With most other hosting plans WordPress patches and updates are your responsibility. On our Business and Premium Hosting plans, we include Managed Updates so your WordPress CMS patches will be installed as they become available.

Where is my website hosted?

This question is far less important than it used to be, the location is not as important as your website speed (see the next point for more on that). Our business and premium use something called a CDN or content delivery network which means your website is served up from hundreds of servers around the world.

Website speed & server capacity – usually completely overlooked!

Website speed is usually totally overlooked by most business owners. You know it yourself, if a website is slow to load you’ll probably click away if you have to wait too long.

Same goes for your own website, if its taking too long to load then you’ll likely be losing visitors. Often the cause of the speed issues is the server capacity or its capability to handle a lot of visitors simultaneously, cheap hosting plans can only handle a few visitors at once, premium hosting plans can handle thousands and can handle sudden surges in traffic without pushing the site offline.

Website speed can also impact where you rank in Google. Preference is given to sites that load faster. We use Pingdom to check website speed, a good load time is generally under 5 seconds. Visit tools.pingdom.com to test your website.

Uptime & support

All servers go down, its a fact of life. Unless you’re willing to pay big dollars for hosting you’ll need to accept your website is going to be offline at least some of the time. Bottom line here, cheap website hosting plans generally have about 95% uptime rate, premium hosting plans are 99.9%.

95% vs 99.9% might not seem like a lot, but 95% uptime means your site will be offline for 1-2 WEEKS a year versus up to 1 day per year.

While support is important, its less important if you’re on a reliable, fast and stable provider. If you’re experiencing poor support from a hosting provider it might be wise to first look at how often you’re using their support. If its more than once or twice a year could there be another underlying issue that is the reason for so many support requests? Bottom line, if you have a plan with high uptime and high capacity servers then you shouldn’t need to regularly contact your hosting provider anyway.

Managed versus unmanaged

This is an important concept to understand particularly when it comes to things like backups. An unmanaged backup is in effect “set and forget”. Its been setup but nobody checks to see if its actually worked. A managed backup is monitored and managed and when it stops working it gets fixed. Unless otherwise stated its best to assume a backup is unmanaged.

Dedicated or shared IP address – important on high end and ecommerce websites

Your IP address is your server address on the internet. For most businsses a shared IP address is fine (multiple sites are on the same server or share the same address) but for high end sites and any site running an SSL certificate you’ll need a dedicated IP address. In some instances and under certain circumstances a dedicated IP address may help you rank higher in the search results.

What types of hosting am I actually buying – there are 4 parts to hosting

There are actually 4 components to hosting and its important you’re clear on what you’re actually buying. In many cases your web company will include email hosting in the services they provide you and in most cases this is a bad idea. In this blog article we explain the 4 parts to web hosting: domain registrar, DNS, Website & Email, make sure you understand all four components before making a decision on who to host with.

Generally speaking we recommend either Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange Hosted Email for business grade email hosting. If you have an existing IT provider they are better placed to advise you on email hosting.

Questions?

Anything we’ve missed or still have a question? Drop us a line over on the Contact Us page