What is Hosting?

hosting

Hosting is where your website lives. Websites are made from software and run on a computer called a server which is housed in a secure facility with high speed connection to the Internet.

But hosting is hosting, right? We wish it were, but just like oils ain’t oils there are a myriad of choices and differences.

The analogy we talked about in our website development page also holds true for hosting.

There are thousands of places to host your site, so why host with ours?

Again, we think it boils down to values of trust, experience, passion and commitment.

You need to trust your web developer, and they need to trust their hosting company intimately. After all, it’s where your data lives. How many companies don’t know where their (and their customer’s data) resides? Are you an Australian company with a website in the US? If your website is hosted with one of the many large WordPress hosting companies, you might be surprised that it’s probably hosted in the US. If you’re in the US, would you host it in Australia? Probably not unless your customers are mainly in Australia.

Data sovereignty regulations aside, why have web traffic from your local customers go across the ocean to then only come back? Response times from your website are slower and it causes network congestion. It’s just e-vironmentally wrong!

We are passionate about great hosting. That’s why we’ve teamed with Lightning Base, a 100% WordPress dedicated hosting company with servers in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. Lightning Base’s servers are located at Google’s datacenters in the Central US (Iowa), Western Europe (Netherlands), Asia (Singapore) and Australia (Sydney). These locations provide great performance to most of the world.

If you just require your WordPress website hosted and don’t need any help with that, please get in touch with Lightning Base. Their support is second to none and one of the main reasons we’re with them.

If you’re still not sure, have a read of this review by News47ell.

Reliability is paramount, but it has to be fast, too!

Our WordPress websites perform super fast using Litespeed, one of the fastest WordPress caching systems available, running on Litespeed servers with Lightning Base.

In addition, as part of our yearly maintenance plan (only AUD$249 per year), you get access to several plugins. One of these is EWWW (acronym for Exactly World Wide Web), in our opinion the best WordPress plugin on the market to optimize your images and improve the speed of your site. Not only that, but you get SWIS Performance, a collection of tools from EWWW for improving the speed of your site even more, including the ability to serve your images from a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This would cost you USD$30 per year alone but you get it included in your yearly hosting maintenance with us for FREE. Really? Yes.

What about Security?

You have enough to do running your business and creating the best content for your WordPress website without worrying about securing and protecting it from brute force, denial of service, spammers and malicious code attacks, just to name a few. It’s a specialist field in itself and another reason why we host our sites with Lightning Base who have a sophisticated firewall monitoring traffic before it gets to your site which is further protected by WordFence, the best protection for your WordPress website. If your site has fallen prey and become infected we can help clean it up and get it running again. Just get in touch.

So what’s hosting cost?

We pass on the cost of hosting that Lightning Base charge which is typically USD$9.95 per month or USD$99.95 if paid yearly.

WordPress themes and plugins are constantly updated by vendors and these need to be regularly updated on your site. You can do this yourself, or we can save you the time and hassle and do this on a regular basis. Firstly, we test the updates on our test site to ensure they work together as often one update can break another plugin and therefore break your site, so care needs to be taken. For a small cost of AUD$249 per year (only $20 per month!) or AUD$349 for WooCommerce/e-commerce sites we do all that for you. It’s cost effective peace of mind.

Full disclosure: We receive a small kick back from Lightning Base for any sites we host with them as part of their affiliate program.

Hosting
$150Australian Dollars yearly inc GST
  • Personal Plan. This is a great plan for small business websites up to 10,000 page views per month. Please ask us if unsure about your requirements.
Domain name
$25Australian Dollars yearly inc GST
  • Domain Types:
  • .com (Billed every year)
  • .com.au (Billed every 2 years)
  • For all other domain types, please ask us but .com and .com.au are our most common.
  • Add $15 for Privacy option for .com domains per year.
WordPress Maintenance
$249Australian Dollars yearly inc GST
Note: $349 for WooCommerce/e-commerce sites
  • Let us take care of all the tedious back end maintenance and plugin updates. We test theme and plugin upgrades on our test server then update your site avoiding a situation where automatic plugin updates can break your site!
  • Our maintenance plan also gives you access to many WordPress plugins that would cost you up to USD$682 or AUD$1020 per year and you get access to them for FREE! by hosting with us and paying maintenance.
  • Elementor Pro - WordPress Editor making it easy to change your site. Saving US$49/year.
  • Ultimate Addons for Elementor - The Complete Elementor Toolkit for New Design Possibilities. Saving US$59/year.
  • Smart Slider3 - The best image slider for WordPress. Saving US$35/year.
  • Relevanssi Premium - The best website search system for WordPress also allowing PDF’s to be searched within your site. Saving USD$110/year.
  • EWWW - The best image optimizer and site performance plugin around. This includes Easy IO, Compress, SWIS Performance and Global CDN Delivery. Saving you another USD$150/year.
  • Rank Math Business - Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress. This gives you access to all the features of the Business Plan normally USD$199 per year!
  • WP Google Maps Pro, Gold and Visitor Generated Markers - The most comprehensive WordPress Map Plugin, ever. Saving you USD$80!
  • You save up to USD$682 or AUD$1020 per year if you had to buy these plugins individually, and you get all of this including with our maintenance!
  • Want to move your site to our hosting and take advantage of these plugins on your site? Contact Us Now.