Small business hosting (possible Down Under)?

February 22, 2006 9:34 PM

I'm looking for recommendations for hosting for a new Australian small business. Yes, I've searched the archives. Yes, I've read all the old hosting recommendation threads.

I've been charged with arranging hosting for a site for a new craft brewery. We don't expect a lot of traffic in the long-term, but there could be a lot of short-term traffic due to media interest. It's a .com.au, if it matters. We'd like it to support one of the free e-commerce solutions, though we don't expect to do a lot of business that way. Reliability is important, though - we're not looking for some kind of flaky personal blog hosting arrangement. If you can recommend any Australian providers who do the right thing when you call up and yell at them, even better.

posted by obiwanwasabi to shopping (7 comments total)

PossiblY Down Under. How embarrassment.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:36 PM on February 22, 2006

Dunno any Australian hosts.

My favorite US hosts for reliability and competent support:

ServInt
TextDrive
Hostmatters

ServInt is the only one of them that you can actually call and yell at. They give you the phone number for their network operations center.
posted by evariste at 9:38 PM on February 22, 2006

I am a wee bit unhappy with Textdrive at the moment. They do have a great offering in terms of their ability to support your whims, but the price you pay is other people's whims bringing down their servers. Their support is very competent and prompt but I don't like having their server status page bookmarked, you know? I have recommended them in the past but I can't do so now until they get their shit together.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:22 AM on February 23, 2006

Any reason it has to be an Australian provider? I live in Sydney, but my host is in the US (Minneapolis, I believe).
posted by qwip at 4:04 AM on February 23, 2006

I've heard good things about SegPub.
posted by djgh at 9:57 AM on February 23, 2006

I manage websites for 3 australian businesses here in Adelaide and they're all hosted at PE Hosting. It's a small company, quite helpful and they seem to have decent reliability. It's not in AU, but that shouldn't really matter. You just need to do your domain registrations in AU. I used domain registration services; nothing particularly good or bad to report about them.
posted by polyglot at 5:38 PM on February 23, 2006

i have been very happy with powweb.com great low price and they offer lots of extras. have several sites hosted with them.
posted by stilgar at 8:19 PM on February 23, 2006