The Best Australian WordPress Hosting in 2026 🇦🇺

0:00Why Budget Should Not Choose Your WordPress Host

Hey, it's Brendan from WP Speed Fix. In this video, I want to talk to you about the best WordPress hosting in Australia. I thought I'd make this video because we're based in Australia, so we get a lot of questions about web hosting in Australia, who is the best web host in Australia, and generally a lot of hosting questions. I'll try and keep the video short but useful, so let's get into this idea of the best web hosting.

You'll see questions all over the web. If you Google best web hosting, or best WordPress hosting, you'll see all sorts of opinions. One guy says one's the best, someone else says the other's the best. It really depends on what type of business you have, what your expectation is, and, oh, I spelled expectation wrong there, and your budget. Traditionally, most businesses choose a web host based on budget or cost, which is a really bad way to do it. There are a lot of cheap hosts on the web, a lot of hosts that'll cost you $2 or $5 a month, and that's going to be problematic if you're running a business on that type of host and expecting quality. Essentially those hosts are like the $2 store, or like the low-cost airline. They're cheap for a reason.

The difference in cost between cheap hosting and good hosting, or the best, I say this all the time, is the difference between the price of a cup of coffee, two bucks, four bucks, five bucks a month, versus the price of maybe a nice lunch, 50 bucks, maybe 100 bucks depending on what type of site you're running. It may be a couple of hundred, but the difference is not substantial when you take into account the business running on top of that website. If your primary criterion for selecting a host is budget or cost, then this video is going to be useful for you. That should probably be the last criterion, or one of the least important criteria, you use to choose a web host.

1:58Cloudways vs WP Alpha for Australian Businesses

Let's get into this. For Australian businesses, there are really two hosts we recommend. First is Cloudways, Cloudways.com.au, and the second is wpalpha.com.au. Full disclosure, WP Alpha is one of our brands. We built that a long time ago for a number of very specific reasons, but before we were mainstream with that brand, we used to recommend Cloudways to everyone. They're essentially the opposite of each other.

Cloudways is not even a host. It's basically a platform where you choose a server from a number of different providers, I think five providers: Google, Amazon, Linode, Vultr and DigitalOcean. You choose a server and then you run their management panel over it. Cloudways is excellent for performance versus price and control. If you want a lot of raw power and a lot of control, and you have technical resources and a budget to pay for those technical resources, like a developer who's going to look after the site on an ongoing basis, then Cloudways might be the best host for you. It might not be, but it's worth a look. It's a very technical host, so if you have technical resources then it's going to be good for you.

WP Alpha is the opposite in terms of being managed. Everything's taken care of for you, and the price reflects that. The price performance curve is a little bit different to Cloudways, but you get a lot of management on top of that. It's managed, it's monitored and it's looked after for you, so that technical piece is taken care of. It's really important to keep in mind that there are technical elements in relation to the hosting that you need to factor in. If you're running a commercial enterprise on that hosting, then it's important that there's something in the budget for tech stuff: developer time, updates, changes to the website, things like that.

3:56CPU, Memory and the Theory of Constraints

Let's get into selection criteria, which brings me to the next point: CPU power and memory. It's important to understand that the raw horsepower of the web host does not equal site speed. It is not a direct correlation. We talked about this in, let me bring it up here, I've got the website open, the theory of constraints. We did a mail out about this a couple of weeks ago, actually. It talks about how the output of a system is a combination of the inputs in that system. Certainly the hosting performance, or the raw horsepower of the hosting, CPU power and memory or RAM, is important, but after a certain point it doesn't make a difference. There are other constraints as well.

I think this might be a better image to illustrate it. If we talk about SEO and Google rankings, it's not just one thing. The output depends on the on-page SEO, the page speed, the amount of traffic you're getting and how well that traffic converts, and that's what determines the leads or the sales the site generates. It's not just one thing. It's the same with website performance. You can have a huge amount of raw CPU and a huge amount of memory available, but if it's configured poorly or there are other problems with the site, all that means nothing. It's like having a Formula 1 car. Whoever wins a Formula 1 race is not determined by the size of the engine. It's a whole bunch of things together: the driver, the car, the team, the configuration of the car. The hosting is the same. The output of the hosting is a number of factors. It is not just raw numbers on a page in terms of performance.

So you're going to need some sort of CPU and some sort of memory. If we look at the different types of sites, you have a normal small business website that has maybe 20, maybe 50 pages, like a local business, a dentist, a doctor, something like that. That's really a content site, and it's not going to need a lot of CPU power. Something like a WooCommerce site or a membership site, with people checking out, people buying things, adding or removing from the cart, is going to need a lot more power, because the load is going to scale up and down with a site like that. It's important that the performance caters for the peak load, not the average load. If there's a particular point in the week or the day where you get a lot of traffic, maybe you're doing a mail out, or, we had a customer last week who has an auction site, close to when the auction closes the site is so much busier and they might have thousands of people on there at once. The hosting needs to cater for that peak load, not the average load, so keep that in mind. Most hosts will allow you to scale up, so if in doubt, you can start small and scale up. Both Cloudways and WP Alpha will let you do that.

7:02Why Hosting Location Matters

Let's talk about location. If you are serving Australian customers, you need to be hosted in Australia. A lot of customers come to us with sites that are hosted in the US, and of course the site is slow. Any time traffic has to travel across an ocean, expect one to two seconds of extra load time. You can get around that using Cloudflare or a CDN, but if you're an Australian business focused solely on Australian customers, it doesn't make sense to put that hosting overseas. You should host it in Australia.

Secondary to the performance considerations, there may be some legal considerations too. Depending on what business or industry you're in, the data may actually need to be stored in Australia for privacy reasons. That's an important point, and if you're dealing with government, keep that in mind. It's not just where the server is hosted, it is also the company that owns that server, whether they're in Australia or not, and where those backups go. If the backups are going to some cloud service, they might be backed up overseas or in some location outside Australia. As long as you're inside Australia, it's not really going to matter which city the site is hosted in. Particularly on the east coast, the speed's going to be the same, no matter if you're in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or Adelaide. In WA, it's probably not going to make much difference either.

8:37Cloudflare APO and AI Patching

Again, we use and recommend the Cloudflare content delivery network for all clients, especially their $5 a month APO service. The reason we recommend APO is that it means the majority of the site is served by Cloudflare. Cloudflare is doing the serving, and Cloudflare has locations, I think, in every single capital city in Australia. So make sure you use Cloudflare as well. We'll talk about that in a minute too.

Patching and updates: somebody has to patch the website. This has to be done, so you're either going to pay for a developer to do this, or you have software to do this. Cloudways and WP Alpha both have some form of AI patching and updates, where they clone the site, test the updates, do some sort of before and after comparison of the screenshots, check for errors on the test site to make sure everything's okay, and then roll the updates onto the live site. The WP Alpha AI is much better than the Cloudways one. The Cloudways one is more simple, but they both do it. WP Alpha has it built in, while on Cloudways it's an extra add-on. No matter what site or what host, you need some consideration for patching and updates.

You should be using AI in 2025, in today's world. There is no reason why you'd have a developer do that when AI can do it faster, cheaper, better and more thoroughly than a developer can. Most AI patching systems can also be run manually, where a human has to provide the input to go ahead, but for most clients we have, we run them in auto mode and there's rarely an issue. With hundreds of sites we manage, we might have one or two a year, and there are new patches nearly every day.

10:33Security, Firewalls and Cloudflare Rules

Security, firewall and malware scanning is an important one, and it directly relates to performance. The better the firewall, the better the security, and the better the configuration of that firewall, the faster the hosting is going to be and the fewer issues you have. There's also a question: if the site gets hacked, will they fix it for free? With Cloudways, I'm not sure. With WP Alpha, yes.

Cloudflare can filter a lot of crap. If you're only serving an Australian audience, we would typically recommend that you filter the traffic from outside Australia through Cloudflare's security CAPTCHA system, and that way it'll filter a lot of the crap that's hitting the website: people trying to hack the website, scrapers, crawlers and malicious traffic. There is an article on our website, if you just search Cloudflare firewall rules you'll find it, on some of the things that we do to configure Cloudflare to filter that, like blocking brute force attacks. Those Cloudflare rules offload that workload to Cloudflare, and it basically stops that load on the website.

Here we come back again to the point that the configuration of the site is really important in terms of performance. It's not just raw horsepower. If you have a site with 20 CPUs of horsepower, but it's getting brute force attacks all day long and aggressive crawlers and scrapers all day long, it's going to use up all those resources and they're pointless. It will just keep using them until they keep hitting the limit. You could have 100 CPUs and they'd still hit the limit. That's again why configuration is important. Using something like Cloudflare immediately eliminates 99% of that crap, so that's an important consideration.

12:04Staging, Storage, Traffic Quotas and Backups

Number of sites you can host: maybe you have more than one website. That's pretty straightforward, as is the cost to host additional sites. Staging sites and the staging capability: again, if you want to run staging sites, consider disk space and storage, especially if you're running staging sites and if you're running AI patching. The AI patching system usually needs to duplicate the site, so you need double. If the site is 5 gig, you're going to need 10 gig of storage, or maybe even 15 to have some overhead. Just keep that in mind, that's a configuration thing.

Traffic quota: a couple of things here. WP Alpha is unlimited, and Cloudways is metered. We would recommend avoiding the direct integration on Cloudways with Cloudflare, because it's metered traffic. I think the base plan only gives you 100 gig of traffic on Cloudflare, which is not a lot for a moderately busy site, so you need to keep that in mind. You don't want to be hitting traffic quotas. If there is a quota on the host you're using, which some hosts have, you want to make sure you've got some budget allocated in case you go over, and some sort of monitoring in place so you're watching that on a monthly basis.

Backups: depending on what type of site you have, if you have a WooCommerce site, you might want to back up hourly. Both Cloudways and WP Alpha let you control the backup frequency. With WP Alpha you can do hourly if you want. With Cloudways I think you can do hourly, it might be three hourly, so you need to check that one. You want to make sure that you understand how the backups work and the frequency of them. If your expectation is hourly backups and it only backs up once a day, then that's going to be a problem, so some consideration needs to be made there.

With backups, you should always run your own backup system as well and never trust a single backup system. In the IT space we say two is one and one is none. The reason is that very often backups will have holes in them. They'll have gaps where a particular time period is not covered or a particular scenario is not covered, or in order to restore one file you need to restore the whole backup, and it takes hours and hours or half a day. There are different types of backups. If you have a couple of different backup systems, depending on what you're restoring from, whether it's a single file deleted by accident, an entire site hacked or a database corrupted, those are very different restores. These different backup systems back up in different ways, and having the ability to restore in different ways gives you some flexibility in those different scenarios. We typically also recommend using the plugin BlogVault for backup on top of the hosting backup, so that might be something you want to consider.

14:46Support, Price, Email Hosting and Uptime

Support: what's your support expectation? Both hosts have 24 hour support, which is pretty decent. Is there enhanced support available? Are there paid support features that you can pay for if you need more detailed support, or are they just going to handball you away and say go speak to a web developer? That's an important consideration. Price: I put price here because price is important, but it's not the primary criterion, so just keep that in mind. You want to be spending 30, 50 bucks a month on hosting for a small business at the entry point. Maybe you need to spend more, but $2, $5, $10 a month is not enough for a small business hosting platform. You are losing something. You might not see it, but a low price like that indicates that there's something nefarious going on, or not nefarious, but you're probably not getting the quality of service that you need to run a business on top of that hosting. Again, like the low-cost airline analogy, during peak loads, do they shut the website down? Is there a time in the day when the hosting platform's getting hammered and the site just crawls? Those sorts of things happen on a $2 a month host because they're stacking thousands of websites on the same server and they don't care. They shrug their shoulders and say, who cares if your site's offline? You're paying two bucks a month, it's nothing.

Speed optimization: is there speed optimization service built in? With Cloudways, like I said, don't use the Cloudways Cloudflare integration if you can help it. Use your own Cloudflare account. WP Alpha also includes basic speed optimization with onboarding, but that may be a consideration you want to make. Who's doing the migrating? Do you get free migrations? Pretty straightforward, or you're going to have to pay for it.

Is email hosting included? You shouldn't host your email with your web host. That's basically our recommendation. They are different services. Email hosting really belongs in the domain of an IT company, so you should have an IT support provider supporting your email if you're a moderately sized business. There are probably only a couple of choices that make sense in a commercial sense for email hosting: Google G Suite or Office 365, maybe something like Proton Mail. You want to use a big cloud service as opposed to the email hosting that comes with your web hosting. It's going to be cheap and not great quality if it's attached to the web hosting. You also have the issue that if the web hosting goes down, and web hosting always goes down, we'll talk about that in a second, your email goes down with it.

Regardless of an uptime SLA, there will always be a point where your web server is going to have an outage. Every host is going to say they have 99.99% uptime, and they're going to have an extended outage at some point in time. One of the core services on the internet is going to go offline at some point. It just happens, and you're going to have to expect downtime. I would say to expect at least one downtime incident a year of two to six hours, and that's just how it is. If you need better uptime, where downtime like that is completely unacceptable, you're going to have to have a bigger budget. You're going to have to have basically failover hosting, and you're going to have to pay accordingly for that, which is going to be in the thousands of dollars a month. It is totally doable, but if your expectation is that there is no downtime, then paying 50 bucks a month is a really big mismatch between budget and expectation. So keep that in mind.

My point is that email is a mission critical service. It should be separate from web hosting. If they're with two different companies, then if one of them goes down, the other one will stay up. You don't want everything down at once, so I would strongly recommend keeping the email hosting separate from the web hosting. It should be somewhere else.

Database caching, whether it's available via Redis or Memcached: good hosts should have some database caching available. CDN or Cloudflare integration: run your own Cloudflare account, don't use the direct integration. Either spend the $5 a month for Cloudflare APO, or spend the 25 bucks a month for the full Cloudflare Pro account. It'll give you more flexibility, more control and unlimited traffic, and you can configure firewall rules and all that sort of jazz. You have full control over the account, and it's much better from a commercial perspective than using the direct integration.

Uptime SLAs, we talked about that. They're just worthless, everyone's going to say they have 99.99%. If downtime is an issue, if the site is down for half a day and your business is going to burn to the ground because of that, you need to have thought that out in advance and you need to be paying accordingly for it. This video is probably not the video you should be watching. You should be talking to a developer or an agency or an IT company about that.

19:45Non-Negotiables: SSL, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3

Things that are non-negotiable: SSL certificates. Every host is providing free SSL certs, and you shouldn't be paying for those. Also, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocol support. The reason I raise this one is that both hosts we recommend have this support, but quite often we still see sites without it in place. Most often it's where they have a VPS, like a dedicated server, configured poorly, but sometimes people are on cheap hosts that don't support these protocols yet. The HTTP/2 protocol has been around for 10 years, since 2015. HTTP/3 is a bit newer. The difference between version 1.1 and version 2 of the protocol is basically a 100% difference in speed, so it is kind of critical from a speed, SEO and conversion perspective that your host has HTTP/2 support.

HTTP/3 is maybe 10 to 20% faster on top of that. Most of the gains from HTTP/3 come from reduced connection time and reduced time to first byte, which is going to be important if you're running paid traffic. Both these protocols are important. HTTP/3 is more important if you have paid traffic, but they both make a difference, and you absolutely must have support for these protocols. There are checkers online, so just type in HTTP/2 check or HTTP/3 check and you'll find them. If your host doesn't support it, you either need to log a support ticket and ask them about it, or move host. That's basically that.

21:22Free Tools and Where To Get Help

That's it for this video. I've given you a lot of selection criteria there. We'll link you up in the description to various bits and pieces. If you want to head to our website, I'll just go back one more, we do have an article on this. There are some other hosts we typically recommend as well, and why we recommend them. If you have any questions, just post in the comments below.

If you're looking for help with your website, help with site speed or help with SEO, we do have a free site speed audit on our website. Go to our site, wpspeedfix.com, and go to Free Site Audit. There are also free tools, no opt-in required: a free SEO audit, a free Core Web Vitals report, and a free WordPress AI speed test. All three of those take about 90 seconds to run, with no opt-in. We also have our mailing list and a website valuation tool, which both need emails. Anyway, I'll leave you to it. I hope you found that useful. Again, let me know if there's anything not clear in the comments. Cheers.