jono.me

Hosting in Australia

// September 3rd, 2009 // Webmaster tips

In the last couple of weeks or so I have moved all my sites from a US based VPS to one located in Australia.

I am going to be hosting an e-commerce site and since it was targeting the Australian market I wanted to be confident that it is going to be as fast as possible for Australian visitors.

When my sites were in the US there was no real noticeable delay browsing the sites but now the server is in Australia you can really see the difference – the response times are great.

You can really tell a difference when FTPing files. A 300MB file took over an hour to download from the US VPS, now it takes less than 10 minutes.

The problem is that the cost of this additional performance is costing about an extra AU$70/month – I was previously paying US$45 (about AU$54), now I am paying AU$125. The specifications of the Australian server (disk space and traffic) is also much less too!

However when you are investing $1000s of dollars on an e-commerce venture the $70/month is insignificant price to pay.

To me the most important aspect was responsive and qualified support. After doing my research I’m confident I’ve found it and so far I am very happy with the move. Wish I wasn’t paying more for it but as I said, is it really worth the risk?