Update: because I’d already payed for the whole year, and the host I’m with has been good, I’ve decided to just upgrade to the next level (with 1% of bandwidth left to go, talk about last minute!). Thanks Myles for the help!
Trying to make some sense of hosting… I hate it when I don’t know enough about something to make an informed decision, and unfortunately Pascal (my husband the graphic designer) can’t help with this either!
Enjoyperth gets a lot of traffic, so I keep having to upgrade my hosting account.
At the moment I host all our websites (including personal blogs) through one account through Digitalis, but EnjoyPerth uses about 90% of the bandwidth.
So at the moment I have 15GB bandwidth, 500MB disk space and pay $30 a month. Disk space is more than enough (would that be because I host all our photos at flickr and photobucket?), but I’m now at 98% with bandwidth, and there’s one and a half days to go…
I could just upgrate to 25GB bandwidth, and pay $45 a month, but I’m curious to see if there’s better options.
First of all I have a feeling I should split up enjoyperth and our personal sites.
Then, looking at other Australian hosts I have heard of, AussieHQ and Fasthit, they seem MUCH more expensive. Do they offer a lot more? Are they much better? Do I need them? I’ve had no problems with Digitalis! (well, none I know of!!)
Then there’s the US hosts, like Dreamhost which I know a lot of people use, and they seem to offer way more, and are much cheaper? Why should I not just go with them? Starting level: 160GB diskspace, 1.6TB bandwidth, US$10 per month!!
But then there’s moving hosts, that sounds like a pain…
No problem! :)
Hi Simone,
Up until very recently I ran a small web host for a little over 4 years so can help answer some of these questions.
Firstly I’ll just preface that I don’t think there is a “best” web hosting company. This is because it is a service industry catering to customers with such diverse needs. You will find that the host for you is decided as a trade-off between what you’re willing to accept in terms of what the host can deliver with support quality, price, reliability and plan features.
I think the most important things to consider when choosing a hosting provider is the ongoing server performance and quality of the customer support when you do need help. If you are happy with both at your current provider I always advise to stick with them. The big figures of terrabytes of data transfer at low cost is attractive but if they can’t deliver support or up time when it matters then the big figures are redundant.
If you are unsure of the current server performance sign-up with a monitoring service like Pingdom to measure your downtime.
If bandwidth issues are pushing the limits of your current plan features and budget it would be best to open an hosting account with a provider on a USA based server that allows file hosting and host all your images, photos, audio, video and associated large files on that to take advantage of the larger bandwidth limits and lower costs.
I certainly would not put the entire enjoyperth.net web site on a USA based server like Dreamhost because if you did so being a .net domain Google will not recognise it as an Australian site. This will then hurt your visitor numbers badly as you will no longer appear in Australian search results. This would not occur if you were using a .com.au or .net.au domain as they’re are reorganised by the search engines as Australian based.
The choice of hosts is always a tough decision with there being 300 local providers who offer hosting as their primary service on local and USD based servers with very little to differentiate between most.
The two companies you mentioned are very well regarded. Fast.hit is Perth based and has a great reputation especially with coldfusion developers. AussieHQ is Canberra based and has grown at a phenomenal rate from a bedroom business run by a 17 year old to now employing 20 people in just a couple of years.
Splitting personal sites away from business sites may give all your sites some SEO benefits and I always think it is a good risk management strategy to not have all your sites on a single server, wether they be personal or business. If the inevitable downtime does occur there’s nothing worse than all email, blogs and corporate sites being affected by the outage and not being able to communicate.
Sorry for the crazy comment length but hope it helped somewhat.
Anthony
Thanks Anthony!
Wow, I never new that was why I showed up on Australian Google with my .net domain! That makes sense! And yeah, wouldn’t want to lose that, traffic from Australian Google is huge part of my traffic!
Thanks for all the other comments, definitely helps!
I guess I don’t have as much to worry about, as my email is all straight through gmail (for now). Oh, and I don’t really have large files at all, no photos, audio, video, I just use flickr and youtube!
So as said above, staying put, it’s not like it’s that expensive at all anyway(I just like getting the best deal!!), though I may split up the sites at some stage.
Simone,
You can go with http://www.bluehost.com as they are only US$6.95 per mth
with 300 gig of storage
and 3000 gig of data transfer every mth
this would fix whatever problems you have.
As a few different bloggers that i know use them as well
including the sydney weblogging meetup.
It all depends on your site and who do you ping as well everytime you blog.
You can ping pingomatic everytime when you blog or post and use http://www.google.com/analytics which is FREE to track where all your traffic is coming from.
I know a few people who have got a .net.au & .org.au domain who have got a PR5 and they are hosted in the USA and still got their site listed in Google Australia.
Sign up with https://www.google.com/adsense so that you can make some money off Google at the same time.
I told a friend of mine about adsense and now he is making over US$500 every mth just from Google not too shabby.
You never know that you might be making more money from adsense than my friend.
Hi Jerry, thanks for dropping by!
I think I still have analytics installed, but I never use it, confuses me..!! But I must try it again sometime (I use statcounter and like that I can easily see what people are googling to get to my blog or through what link they come in)
Yeah, I guess it’s alright having .net.au and .org.au in the US, but I only have .net so then there wouldn’t be any other way of telling I’m in Aus. So I’ll stick with my aussie provider for now.
Yep, I nearly only use Adsense at the moment, make a bit of money (not on this blog, but on http://www.enjoyperth.net , not as much as your friend), though I think I could do much better with textlinkads (have some at the bottom only at the moment) or even direct ads(to much work!)
If only I had more time, I could do so much (ok, no, I’d probably still procrastinate most of the time…!)
Hi Simone,
Try Ilysis, they’re based here in Perth and have some pretty reasonable packages. I host a few sites with them and the thing I like most is fast FTP response time. Previously I had hosted in the US and waiting for files to transfer was extremely tedious.
Cheers, Kate
Thanks Kate, I’ll take note of them for when I look at hosting again(next year I think)
:)