By tinavdg on
Hi everyone,
I will soon be the proud owner of a community-based website for Australians. I will scale my hosting as the website gets bigger, so am ok with starting with something smaller but it has to be reliable. I'm also quite new to all this so I need some excellent customer service.
Does anyone know of any good hosts in Australia? What is the benefit of hosting in Australia v in the US - is it better just to go with a good US host or should I really be going for a local host?
Many thanks
Comments
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If the site is intended to cater to a community of Australians then I would think you want a host in Australia. It would be a shorter distance between machines. However, what you need to make sure of is that the hardware is actually located in Australia and not simply a reseller with machines elsewhere.
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Ok thanks, how will I know if they are not just a reseller?
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ask them where their datacenter is located or find one that advertises their datacenter as being in Austrailia. A google search reveals many. Get one with a money back guarantee. shared hosting is hit or miss as the performance is dependent upon every site running on the server. Customer service will not typically aid you very much with scripts on the server, ie drupal or any other unless they specifically advertise that it is their niche. They tend to manage only the machine and the environment. If the idea is to grow find a host you can easily switch to a VPS or dedicated server should the need arise.
more often than not, you get what you pay for. Value hosts can offer cheap pricing because they tend to provide less service. If you haven't even started building your site yet and you are new to all of this, you don't need a host. Set up a local environment on your home machine and pocket the monthly fee while you learn.
Web Hosting Australia
For search engine optimisation reasons it would be best to go for a web host in Australia. I assume that you would like to rank high in Google Australia and not in the USA. It's true that you can set your country preference in Google Webmaster Tools but that's not enough. For one reason or another, Google needs multiple signals about where a website is located. The location of your hosts data center is one of the most important signals for the search giant. If, for some reason, you are unable to find a good host in Australia which I doubt, you could try my very excellent hosting provider in the United Kingdom. Read more at http://weloveourhost.com
Where did you get this
Where did you get this information from? You won't rank any better because your web host is "closer". There may be a small speed bonus which helps but saying this is a major SEO boost is just plain wrong.
Wrong. Google does rank
Wrong. Google does rank websites against domain name (.com.au) and location. So that web sites .com.ua hosted in US will rank lower. Also, speed maters too. Websites loading faster will rank higher. I just recently recommended redyhost.com.au in another thread, very surprised good hosting is still a problem in AU.
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The domain name does make a
The domain name does make a difference. Location of the server doesn't directly make such a difference, but the load speed of the site in the country for which it is targeted makes a difference to SEO, and as an in-Australia server will almost always be faster than a server from outside the country, location will matter in this case.
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