Web Hosting

Hi Phil, I've thought hard about this one as I manage a web hosting co.s Partner Program :)

This is what I have discovered by talking to our existing and prospective partners, in no particular order.

Peace of mind. They want their client websites to be looked after, issues resolved quickly and good communication
Security and performance. Taken care of at server level so there is less to do with the platform (eg. hosting).
Expert, local support. This is a key one: to be able to jump on a call and speak to someone local who can address their issue, looking at their specific problem, and not just given them a canned response.
Based in Australia. For performance, compliance and better support.

Quite a few of our partners are looking to earn via referrals or reselling our services, as well as getting leads off us.

Hope this helps.

Lawrence
 

I would personally stay away from any domain names that are COM, NET or ORG. Everything else is just a marketing upsell and no one really uses them. Just search in Google for example... nearly all of the sites ranking will have the domain endings like the ones above.

If you need help coming up with a domain name, try using any of these domain name generators .

webhosting is cheap. as Meng said, depends on the number of visitors you believe you will have.

Most webhosting packages will give you unlimited email addresses, disk space and pretty much everything unlimited. You need to read the fine print though as "Unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited. There are limits however they are pretty high. You will not need anymore than 20gb in most cases unless you want a really big database loaded on your hosting and plan on having a lot of emails and images/video's hosted on your account also.

So as long as you are getting 20gb of hosting space you will be fine. Generally the hosting account would cost you about $10 or less per month for "unlimited"

That should come with Cpanel (not cpanel lite or anything cheap like that) and also a tone of free programs.

Hi Michelle,

Digital Pacific are very good and affordable. Their support and customer service is excellent and they are Australian owned and based.

https://www.digitalpacific.com.au/

Regards Che

I am in the USA so my perspective needs to be taken with a grain of salt. All of what Terry mentioned above is important.

I've used Godaddy for about 8 years and had very few issues. I pay roughly $100 - $120 a year for the hosting. I have a bundle of 5 SSL certificates which is another $150 a year. However, for me their hosting is convenient because I can host many domains in the same hosting account (currently I have about 15 domains, 8 of which have actual content).

However, Godaddy and most "Traditional" hosting companies are PHP optimized (on the Linux operating system (OS)). They may offer Windows (OS) hosting that supports ".net", "Java" and ".asp" but usually that is a bit more expensive.

Why does this matter? If you are set on using a framework or software built in another language such as Python, Ruby or Node JS - you may need to look at distributed or Cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon AWS, Heroku, Google or others. Typically these services support the other languages but also can handle more capacity (users at a time) because they can scale easily. Keep in mind the cost structures of these services are usually a bit more complicated.

The important thing is you know what is important to you (bandwidth, storage space, scale-ability, cost, etc.) before you make your decision. If you aren't sure, try getting some guidance from vendors by explaining the goals of your hosting needs.