Recommendations for Australian Hosting

I can resell VPS hosting on a highly reliable server in the USA.

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Dennis M. Gray
Far East Information Resources Pty Ltd
Skype: d0325mgray
Mobile: (0418) 646267 +61 418 646 267
Phone: (02) 9310 7907 +61 2 9310 7907

I've currently got sites running on:

Quadrahosting
Smartyhost
Domain Central
Bottle Domains

I ranked them in order from best to worst performing ... all are reasonably priced. Quadrahosting has no telephone support (if that's a problem), but they seem pretty switched on. Support requests are usually resolved promptly. These are all reseller or multi-domain accounts, no VPS.

I'm still looking of a permanent home for all my sites, as Quadrahosting doesn't scale well (only 50 domains per account).

I'm moving a few sites to Rimuhosting, which is based in New Zealand but has data centers on three continents, including Australia.

Try Egressive if you can't find anything in Aussie. They have servers in Christchurch which isn't too far away, and may also have or be able to recommend in Australia. They're a Drupal shop so their servers will be well tuned for your needs.

Ilisys are reputable. I've got about 100 domains with them.

Your choice of datacenters in Sydney and Brisbane, seems to be lot speedier than similar shared hosting in US.

I like them, you get good bang for buck, the guy running it seems to be very switched on.

I don't run that many sites so really can't comment on support that much. Email support is good, have only tried phone support once.

One example I had to get them to handle the email with a server in totally different domain and location, they helped do that including a backup mailserver on this other domain - in the context of shared hosting. So are flexible and help you out, even though was only paying $20/month for the hosting.

Make sure you look into their 'developer' config shared hosting.

www.netlogistics.com.au

I would not touch Australia hosting services. They are over priced and under preforming. esp when you compare this to the other hosting services around the world.

I would recommend Rimu hosting with a machine in their US data centers. Nice powerful setups and the cost is reasonable. They do offer services in their Brisbane data center, but the cost of this is just not worth it.

Unless you have a specific requirement for Oz, I wouldn't rule out overseas hosts. They seem to be cheaper and offer more features, eg. more diskspace, more download, etc.

Most hosting providers only offer e-mail or web-based support to keep their costs down, so there's little benefit in having your hosting provider in the same timezone as you. You can't ring them during our office hours.

I'd always go for one that gives you shell access. Web-based only access can be limiting. There are some things that just take so much longer or you simply can't do via the web.

I've worked for a few, and tried a few, Australian hosts but for my rag tag collection of websites I cannot justify the costs.

I am currently using Dreamhost which is cheap and cheerful, they do shared, dedicated and VPS. They are pretty huge so you'll find lots of opinions out there. Personally I like the Shell access, I can switch FTP off and force my users to use sftp or ssh, unlimited domains and huge amount of bandwidth and space. I've barely had to use support because the DH control panel is excellent and covers just about everything. I'm on shared at the moment with about 15 domains.

Quadrahosting and Smartyhost look like they might be good (but expensive) options, just going from their websites and Matts opinion.

Looks like there is big opening for some decent Aussie VPS host... anyone?

cheers
ruben

I can't recommend AussieHQ highly enough: http://aussiehq.com.au/

There support is second to none.

While they my not be the cheapest option, they are certainly the most reliable host I've been with over the years.

If they are too expensive, their daughter company Jumba is a good alternative: http://jumba.com.au/

Cheers.

It is so great that we got so many responses here. I hope people will continue to post Aussie Hosting suggestions here, so that people can benefit from this knowledge.

My particular need has been met for the time being. I've been using Quadrahosting for Drupal sites for almost 3 years and have been happy with them and have often recommended them. Recently though they reconfigured the server that my sites were on and two of my most important sites went down completely. That was the point where I began to seek alternatives. Now, however they have rectified the problem, by moving my sites to another server, and all is fine for the time being. I'm using their shared hosting plan, but they are about to introduce a VPS plan, which I may consider.

I also use dreamhost and pair.com in USA for my international clients, but I find for various reasons I need Aussie hosting as well. It is just nice to have a local site hosted locally. "Nice" is not a very technical word I know.... but I find there is some degree of happiness when clients know their site is in Sydney or Brisbane rather than Austin or L.A.

From a SEO point of view at times local hosting is best. For example one of my Aussie clients has a .net name and when her site was hosted in USA google.com.au would not list it. To get her site having a reasonable ranking in the Australian listings I had to move its hosting to Sydney. Google defines an Australian site as either a/ having a .au name, or b/ hosted in Australia. I am not sure if, beyond that, SEO is enhanced by having an Australian .au site as well hosted in Australia.

I need an Aussie host for various reasons, and also I need the cheap convenience of unlimited domains and databases etc of dreamhost, which I use primarily for development.

For now I will remain with Quadrahosting and continue to recommend them. I am interested that others who responded also are happy with them. I will be interested in any reviews of their VPS plans once they come on line sometime this month.

While we're on the subject of shopping around for hosting providers, I've found it really pays to shop around for a domain name too, especially in the .au TLD. I've seen ".org.au" prices range from AUD$15 to $60. So if you find a good hosting provider, don't automatically use them to register your domain. You can often do a lot better.

Hi John,

I've been with Australian based MD Web Hosting for a couple of years. They are now hosting three of my sites and I've been very happy with their server performance, package prices, and their technical support. They have a good range of services, including VPS and SMS, but I haven't used these yet.

Check them out at http://www.mdwebhosting.com.au

Cheers,

David

I have been using webcity for $7 a month, has everything I need, including shell access. Only thing I don't like is I can't log into MySQL through the shell, have to use Php admin stuff. Address is http://webcity.com.au/web-hosting/

A client signed up for the 1000MB Smartyhost $12.50 per month and it is terrible. PHP 4.3.9 No Lock Tables permissions and only 16MB of PHP memory. They don't answer their phone and Support tickets take 24hrs. They didn't supply an IP address with the welcome email - took a week to get that from them. Unbelievable! Crappy control panel.

Netlogistics Velocity One for $19.95 per month is excellent in that everything is as it should be. PHP 5.2.3, 64MB of PHP memory, great cPanel, everything works without any problems.

That is my measure of a good webhoster - you never need support. Everything is as you expect and everything works.

Geoff

Thanks everyone for this very helpful thread. Currently I'm with Segment Publishing which is rather expensive and the servers are in the US. We want to move our site to Aus and I thought I'd do it at the same time I migrate our site to Drupal so I'm investigating all the comments mentioned!

Anyway... VPS seems like a cool thing for certain uses, but I guess it is more expensive so: is this really something that would be useful for a standard drupal site? Surely limited shell access would be enough for even the trickiest Drupal jobs?

Also, does VPS make admin more complicated (since you're handling an entire server)? I will have to train some other admins so there is some interest in keeping things straightforward.

Fletch

Another question... is authenticated SMTP on a port other than 25 generally available on hosting plans? With our current host we can send email on port 485 which is really nice. If your users take their laptops and plug them in to a Telstra or Optus broadband connection they will find they are unable to send their email on port 25, even if they authenticate to their SMTP server (Telstra and Optus block traffic on port 25 except traffic directly to their own mail servers).

I definitely need this "Authenticated SMTP on non-standard port" feature on our new host.

Thanks,
Fletch

@fletchgqc: I've just finished setting up a VPS based in the US on slicehost.com. The reason I chose a VPS other other methods was an excellent price/performance ratio. For US$20 a month I get 256Mb of guaranteed memory with root shell access on a quad Opteron box. This is excellent as it guarantees me a certain amount of processor cycles and memory, memory being the more important factor for Drupal. Having root access is a huge advantage over shared hosting as I was able to install my choice of software.

I've configured my box to run nginx (instead of Apache), PHP5 as fastcgi, MySQL 5 with query cache, xcache for php and memcache. This is easily the fastest I've ever seen Drupal run unless locally installed. It absolutely flies for authenticated users as well as anonymous.

When you choose a host you really need to weigh up price matched against performance, with an eye on reliability. With slicehost, I can upgrade or downgrade at any time with no impact of the site and no downtime. So as my site grows in users and therefore memory overhead, I can upgrade to the next level slice and so on until I hit the top model. From there I can start expanding sideways with more slices, one for the database, others for serving content etc.

If you want a lower memory footprint then an alternative web server like nginx or lighttpd are the way to go. They are fast and use little resources and are as reliable as apache.

Next you need to optimise a few things, especially mysql. Caching helps immensely so I decided on xcache and memcache, xcache for opcode caching of Drupal and memcache for query and variable caching. This takes the strain away from the filesystem and mysql and puts the responsibility on the system's memory, which is immeasurably faster.

Finally for monitoring I set up Monit, which will keep a watchful eye on the processes and ensure none of them fail, if they do they are restarted and it keeps the system humming along. All in all this took me a day to set up and I only have limited experience in these things. Everything you need to know is online, just search away.

For SMTP and incoming mail I just use gmail, configured via google apps for my domain.

If anyone goes with slicehost.com I'm always appreciative of a referral, when signing up you can use my email address which is: tanc at whitespace-studios dot com (remove all spaces and change 'at' to an @ sign). Thanks.

Time to share my experiences so far...
I'm using Newsprout for commercial hosting, who so far are going well. Sometimes you get the impression that they don't have many clients, but the service works and they have basically done whatever I asked for which is nice.

I also signed up with Quadrahosting at the same time but their control panel is so counter-intuitive that I cancelled the account (there might have been another reason too, I can't remember) and got a refund. For example, Cron jobs configuration is found under the "FTP Users" icon. Weird.

Meanwhile I was looking for a host for my personal email, as smartyhost started wrongly bouncing emails sent to me and giving "mailbox full" messages. I forgot about all the bad things written about MD in this thread and signed up with them. 2 days later I'm wondering why I'm getting no email, lodge a support ticket and get this response:

Dear Valued Customers:
This evening at 4:55 in The Planet’s H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

They have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. They were not allowed to activate their backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

All members of The Planet’s support team are in, and all vendors who supply them with data center equipment are on site. Their initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured they are working around the clock.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and apologize for the impact.

I don't have time to wait a week and hope their servers come back up... so now I'm with crazydomains.com.au for personal email. This service actually works.

I must admit that I also went for the cheapest options with the personal email, by the way. But honestly how hard is it to provide email?

You could also try Anchor - www.anchor.com.au for Drupal hosting. Definitely not dirt cheap hosting but the support is pretty good.

I recently (nervously) changed from hosting at www.tpg.com.au (expensive and you get poor value) to www.web24.com.au.

I have another site hosted in the USA (a .com.au) with Webstrike Solutions (now EasyCGI)this one I wanted an Australian-based IP for local search results (being a .com for an Aussie business)

I set-up a drupal site with a few small issues, (increased the PHP memory limit and loosened some mod_security settings to embed google maps and youtube videos) both of which problems were attended to promptly by support.

Reliability is great, so far excellent uptime. Control Panel Linux and Windows, VPS, dedicated servers - they've got lots.

I can definitely recommend these guys and will be changing over my other tpg-hosted site with them soon (as soon as the prepaid period expires).