Hi Everyone,
I am new to Joomla, and am organising a project for the creation of a retail website. I need to look at having the website hosted.
Can anyone recommend a reputable company in either Melbourne or Brisbane that offers infrastructure that includes Joomla and mysql?
The site will most probably have 3 instances, Production, Developement and VOlume testing.
Thankyou
Joseph

Hi Joseph,
Not sure why the preference for those cities but I have sites on both of these joomla friendly sites and a good thing about them is they have a 24/7 support chat line which you can use to make sure a host is right for you. With the control panel that sites like these use installation of joomla is easy.
What ever host you choose make sure they have the features and benefits of hosts like these.

JUST HOST (Perth) stats.justhost.com/track?c8e2ff86699987647344749f96c973550
BLUE HOST (USA) www.bluehost.com/track/rgoz/text1

[Note: if you find a good host become an affiliate so when you recommend people you get a little payment.
If you use one of the links above and you eventually sign up I will benefit. If you are not comfortable with that go to the site direct ]
Happy searching
Razz :o)

Hi Razz,
Thanks for the tips but these are both US sites. I understand that hosting an Aussie site outside of Australia is detrimental to Google ranking, and may have response issues.
Joseph

A number of people in MJUG are now using www.micron21.com for their hosting. Their Melbourne based and have a range of options.

It's not so much the google rankings that affect hosting Australian sites on non-Australian servers - it's more that the speed is 10% of that available on Australian servers in most cases.

Hmm - I just don't get this speed thing. Can someone provide a quick speed tut.

I do a lot of work for various networking and other companies and their sites run no faster than say overseas isps (like rochen or siteground).

As I undertsood it this was because routing is not controlled by isps and can jump all over the world anyway.

Thanks would appreciate some straightening out here

As someone that just lost all their sites (about 15) on Bluehost, I certainly would never recommend them. They had done NO backups at all and I lost the lot. Luckily, I had done some of my own backups (of a couple of really important sites) but they were completely unconcerned and not the slightest bit contrite about their server crashing and wiping me out - there was nothing left - not a file. It's been about a month now, and I'm still picking up the pieces.

So, from my point of view - they have no worthwhile features and benefits, unless you're in the market for risky, cheap (in every sense) hosting. I've learned my lesson about cheap hosting.

Jap,
I know of no effect on Google ranking, speed or response difference. If there is any I would really like to see some data on this. Can anyone help please?

Sue,
On bluehost: I have not had not had any problem and have found them very helpful and patient via the 24/7 chat but if i had your experience, I would be hopping mad. I will tread carefully and keep backups.
regards to all,
Razz

I develop sites all over the world and often have to develop on servers outside of Aus, and I can assure you that the geographical distance plays a massive part in performance.

Further I was recently in Nth America, and was amazed at how fast many common sites (google facebook joomla etc) responded, and it was nothing to do with the connection I was on. Rather a ping time to say google.com from Aus is about 230ms on most Aussie ISP connections. Doesn't matter how fast your connection is, that's the time it takes to send a packet and have it returned.
Whereas in Canada the time was about 40ms. So that's a QUARTER of the time. Each and every click you make is 4 times quicker.

So yes, if you have an Aussie site for Aussie viewers (predominantly) then host in Australia.
For what it's worth I use a VPS from Jumba.

Interesting.

I tried porting this site to Media Temple VPS (I experimented on both their Virginia and California servers) a year or two back, and it was slower than Rochen's shared hosting. Still using Rochen now, and if the site is slow (which it is!) it's largely because it's a biggish site and needs a rebuild and some MySQL maintenance.

We are now experimenting with Micron21 (melb).

I first noticed how abysmally slow things were in Australia compared to US by watching J1.5 online screengrab tutorials (e.g. lynda.com) and noticing that theirJoomla 1.5 screen refreshes are almost instantaneous. Hence they do not feel the pain of having to select two things from two dropowns in the backend (e.g. Article Manager > Section and Category, or whatever) and wait for two full refreshes!

Hi Joseph,

When doing my Bruce Clay training last year, we discussed this matter. I have a number of com.au sites hosted on VPS serves in the USA, and I still get them ranking in the top 10 of Google.com.au - but there is def. benefits in having your hosting on Australian based IP Addresses. Depending on how technical you want to get, you can house all your grunty images and large files (maybe ever database) on a US based server, and run the HTML / PHP pages on an Aussie based host.

When we discussed the topic (for SEO purposes), it was agreed that if you have more then one URL - like bruceclay.com , bruceclay.com.au , bruceclay.co.uk etc that it as best to have them hosted in country, as this does avoid the dup content issues and winding pages into the supplementary index.

I have used VPS hosting with a place called knownhost.com in the US and never had any outages. We are also using a company called netlogistics.com.au for Aussie hosting.

I would like to find a few more actually, so if you have found some since your original post, I would be interested in hearing more.

Cheers,
Dallas

With regard to Google ranking I think its more having a .com.au domain name that will have an effect. I have a children's bicycle website that is hosted in America (and with a .com URL, not .com.au) and within 3 months of going live we were hitting the top page in Google for kids bikes but not if you searched in Australia, only for the worldwide search.

So I think hosting in America is more of a speed thing and its the domain name that makes a difference being picked up on Australian Google searches.

Correct me someone if I'm wrong!

p.s. its now 9 months since launch and we're finally getting onto the first page of most Australian Google searches but we have a lot of links going out and coming in from online Australian bicycle stores so I think that has helped a lot

Have you listed a site map in Google Webmaster Tools Jen and nominated Australia as the predominant market?

Cheers,

Ric

Sorry for the late reply Ric! Yes, I setup the Google Webmaster account when the site went live and at the time specified Australia as the main location. However we have never added a sitemap...

So, you need to install Xmap and submit the url to your webmaster account Jen. Any queries, skype me at bushsong.

Cheers,