Whether you are setting up a website for a small Australian business or a global organisation with a local presence, you will need to find a host that is capable of meeting all your needs at a competitive price. In order to do this, you will first need to consider what your needs are and how much they are likely to change in the future. Below, we take a look at the most popular types of hosting packages currently available in Australia, along with the pros and cons associated with each option.
Australian web hosting packages
As is the case in most areas of the world, Australian web hosts offer a variety of different types of hosting packages. The most commonly available types are as follows:
- Shared hosting packages — As the name indicates, if you choose shared hosting, your website will share server space with many other sites. The main advantage of this type of package is the low cost. Because you are sharing a server with other companies and individuals, your hosting package will cost much less than most other types of packages currently available.
- Dedicated hosting packages — With a dedicated hosting package, the server on which your site is located will not be hosting any other websites. This means you don’t have to worry about the possibility of other websites’ traffic degrading the performance of your own. However, because you have a server to yourself, the cost of dedicated hosting is considerably higher than shared hosting.
- Cloud hosting packages — For companies and public sector entities that are interested in highly scalable and reliable Australian web hosting services, a Cloud hosting solution is worthy of serious consideration. With such a hosting package, your website may be located on multiple servers in the Cloud, providing excellent redundancy at an affordable cost. What this means in practice is that if one of the servers on which your website is hosted should happen to go offline, your website, and the data that it relies on, will still be available.
- VPS hosting packages — Virtual private server (VPS) hosting packages offer the flexibility of dedicated hosting without the higher costs. However, because VPS solutions are still hosted on a single physical server, which also hosts other websites, they do not offer the same scalability benefits as either dedicated or Cloud hosting packages.
- Co-location hosting packages — Offered by data centre operators, a colocation hosting package is one that allows businesses to buy their own servers and networking equipment, which is then installed in a remote data centre. This option involves the highest capital expenditure but also provides a higher degree of control over the physical IT assets on which your website is hosted.
If you anticipate a large amount of traffic and would like to make sure the hosting for your website can easily be scaled up in the future, a Cloud hosting package is likely to be your best option. For smaller websites, shared or dedicated hosting packages are still the most popular choice.
Originally posted 2022-05-19 10:54:52.
