SiteGround Review Australia
Australia is a big country and because of its special geographical location, it is hard to serve international visitors with data from there. In comparison with other areas of Earth, Australia has weak data connection to other countries, so local web hosting providers are mainly good for domestic websites. The biggest reason why this country is not well-connected to other areas is the lack of submarine data cables.
Why submarine cables are so important:
- most of the data forwarding is made by submarine cables
- they are much faster (TerraBytes/second) than satellites (GigaBytes/second)
- a cable is much fault tolerant
- and there is smaller data latency in cables than satellites
Source: submarinecablemap.com
These advantages show why submarine cables are used everywhere and why the data forwarding is based on them. The reason why we don’t use them everywhere is that connecting two different physical locations with each other by using cables, costs hundreds of millions of dollars.
If you live in Australia and plan to launch a website for international visitors, it is worth to find a good hosting provider from other countries. Thousands of cheap hosts are available Worldwide, but it is recommended to use only those ones which are reliable enough.
We recommend SiteGround. It has data centers on 3 continents; the nearest one to Australia is located in Singapore and ideal for your international customers as well. In this article we will review this company so you can choose the best solution for your website.
Why do Australian Customers Choose SiteGround?
- Versatile product range: SiteGround has many web hosting solutions and offers entry-level shared hosting services and advanced dedicated server hosting as well.
- SSD drives: In opposite to other hosting companies, SiteGround uses only SSD drives as storages. You can forget the much slower classic HDDs and work with the much faster modern solid state drives.
- Latest technologies: The company uses the most up-to-date technologies and scripts, including PHP 7, NGINX, Python, Perl and free CDN services.
- Free SSL: SiteGround provides a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certification for all hosting packages. This means an https for your site and bigger trust from visitors and search engines.
- 7/24 support: The dedicated support team is available around the clock and you can reach them via phone, chat or the onsite ticketing system. The company is known about highly available and professional site support, so you will get real support with skilled people.
- Reliable and big: SiteGround was launched in 2004 and nowadays has over 400 employees and hosts more than 1,700,000 domain names. It is one of the biggest web hosting provides of the industry, so your data will be in safe at a reliable provider.
- Amazing uptime and speed: SiteGround’s has 99.99% uptime which means maximum 8.6 seconds unavailability a day and this value is above the industry average. The load time of the company servers is around 700 milliseconds which is much better than the average. And another important fact, that SiteGround servers do not have slow loading times, they work reliable on long term as well.
- 30-day money-back guarantee: The company gives you 30 days after the ordered service is activated for testing the hosting experience. If you are not happy with the results, you can get back your money. The guarantee is not valid for Cloud and Dedicated Hosting services.
- Unlimited number of email accounts: You can add as many email accounts with your domain ending as you want. Even the cheaper shared hosting plan can be used to create an unlimited number of email accounts, and you can freely set up auto responders and forwarders too. The cPanel interface can be used to manage the mail accounts with few clicks only.
- Drag-and-drop website builder: If you don’t have coding knowledge, you will use the drag-and-drop website builder a lot. With it, you can build up your sites by dragging and dropping the desired website elements to their designated place, you can add images, videos, texts and create nice layouts.
- Easy signup process and localized web site versions: You can sign up to SiteGround by completing an easy signup process, entering your data on a one page interface. At the bottom of the site you can choose your geographical area, including World, United Kingdom, Spain, United States, Europe, Italy, LATAM or Australia. The displayed prices, the currencies and website language follow your choice. You can pay your hosting with Visa, MasterCard and American Express.
SiteGround is our number #1 recommended WordPress host for Australia.
SiteGround Hosting Plans
The entry-level shared hosting service of the company is called Web Hosting and it is available in 3 versions:
- StartUp: The cheapest package is suitable for a single site, up to 10,000 monthly visitors. There is a 10 GB space included and you can add an unlimited number of email accounts and databases. The backup system makes backup of your site every day and the CDN can be also used for free of charge. It starts at $3.95/month (regular price $11.95/month).
- GrowBig: This package already lets you to add multiple websites and provides 20 GB of storage. It can be good for up to 25,000 monthly visitors and few extra services, including free backup restores, priority support, super cache and site transfer are also added along the StartUp extras. It starts at $5.95/month (regular price $19.95/month).
- GoGeek: This is the geeky package of SiteGround and suitable for up to 100,000 overall monthly visitors. The storage is 30 GB big and next to previously mentioned extras you will get geeky extras, including GIT repo, free backups on demand, WordPress and Joomla staging and more. It starts at $11.95/month (regular price $34.95/month).
WordPress Hosting is a hosting type, specially designed for WordPress website owners. You can get a free WordPress install or a free migration of your already existed WP site to your new storage in any of the WordPress Hosting packages. The auto updates of the software and WP CLI & SSH support is also included into all packages.
This type of hosting starts at $3.95/month (regular price $11.95/month). For this money you can run a WordPress website on your storage and use up to 10 GB disk space to store your files.
There is also a WooCommerce Hosting service at SiteGround, offering 3 special WooCommerce packages. Along with the hosting part, you will get extra features, including pre-installed WooCommerce and StoreFront, daily backups and an auto updater.
The cheapest WooCommerce package starts at $3.95/month (regular price $11.95/month). It was designated to serve up to 10,000 monthly visitors and you will get 10 GB storage for it.
Cloud Hosting gives you more server resources and the advantage of the cloud platform. You can choose from the fully managed packages and benefit from one of the worldwide available 4 data centers. One of the biggest advantages is the presence of auto-scalable resources. This means that you can add ever more server resources to your package with a click, or set it to follow automatically the server load and traffic pikes.
The offer is available from $80/month. For this amount you will get 2 CPU cores, 4 GB memory, 40 GB storage and 5 TB data usage.
Reseller Hosting is also available at SiteGround, you should purchase at least 5 reseller credits to start with it. Each credit means a year hosting for one of your customers, the more credits you buy the better prices you will get. Your customers will get a cPanel and will have the same benefits as Web Hosting users have. Reseller credits are available for $49/credit price, if you buy at least 10 of them, then its price become $42/credit.
Enterprise Hosting does not provide packages, since it offers you a totally customized solution for web hosting. By choosing it you will be provided with an account manager, who will help you to go through on the evaluation process. At the end of it, your company will get a hosting solution with the best price and reliable server tools.
Dedicated Server Hosting is available in 3 different data locations, in the United States, Europe and Asia. Since you are interested in the nearest location to Australia, the Asia-Pacific data center is recommended to use. There are 3 different server packages available using Intel Xeon processors, SSD drives and DDR3 memory.
The smallest package gives you 4 CPU cores and 8 threads of Intel Xeon E3-1230 processor, 16 GB memory, 480 GB storage and 10 TB of bandwidth. The biggest package provides a RAID1 data mirroring tool as well. The Dedicated Server Hosting packages start at $329/month.
Conclusion
Is SiteGround good for Australians? The answer is definitely YES. The versatile product range, highly scaled packages in each hosting types, amazing uptime and load times, skilled customer support and near data center in Singapore are the key facts why we recommend SiteGround for Australian customers.
If you are an Australian, you can be sure that your website will be in good hands and your international customers will be served by your site fast and reliable way. Just choose the appropriate hosting package and start working on your website today!
