Finding the right WordPress Hosting Provider in Australia can be a tedious task.

I can tell you over the last 10 or so years we’ve tried many solutions here at online innovation

, both for our own projects and our clients and the range on offer is HUGE! There’s a few things we’ve learned that really makes a wordpress hosting account both easy to manage and easy to implement new features, so well try to cover as much as we can in this short article.

For those of you who are just after a wordpress hosting provider that we use recommendation that link will take you straight to our host providers, most small businesses will use the business package.

Features we look for in a Good WordPress Hosting Provider

CPanel – Is one of the easiest platforms to use for the novice and professional alike. Whilst common many suppliers use their own back end system which make it hard to move to another provider should you ever want to change.

Almost anyone without any hosting configuration experience will be able to create email accounts and set them up in their own programs like outlook with ease.

One Click WordPress installation – Although not always recommended if you are developing a completely new wordpress website from scrath this feature can be a huge time saver. Usually the wordpress installation process goes like this:

1. Create a MySQL database
2. Create a user
3. Give the new user permission to access the database
4. Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org
5. Go to file manager upload your zipped wordpress file
6. unzip WordPress into root directory
7. copy files to root directory and remove wordpress folder
8. open WP-config-sample.php edit user details and database details hit save
9. edit name to WP-config.php and hit save.
10. No head to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php
11. run installation and your done.

So you can see what a time saver one click install can be 🙂 point made

Addon Domains – This is a feature that you wont find for a lot of services as it allows you to host multiple sites on a single account. a good provider will allow you to scale up by purchasing additional resources. Some very cheap  providers will allow you to host as many websites as you like. These are highly shared servers and are highly exposed to hacking.

Why do we like addon domains? why should i have multiple accounts for multiple websites? addon domains allows us to host multiple websites or multiple sub domains without using a private server or VPS.

Quarterly or annual discount incentives – This is great for small business because come tax time if you are in a good position you will most likely be looking at paying tax, services which offer incentives allow you to pay in advance thus reducing your tax whilst also improving cash flow for the in advance period by offering a discount.

Auto WordPress Updates – This is a big one, cheap sub $10 per month hosting companies very rarely offer this feature.

What it means for you as a business owner is if wordpress has a security update and you are not aware of this, your server will force an update which will  potentially protect your website from hackers. The downside can be if you have had some custom programming done to your site you will need to contact your programmer and ask them how the update has effected your site.

We recommend always staying in touch with your WordPress developer anyway so you are aware of any changes that are in the pipeline like responsive websites or plugin upgrades or licenses expiring for premium plugins.

Email Forwarders – Amazingly some wordpress hosting providers still do not allow you to setup a email forwarder from within cpanel…. what the? its such s simple function and being able to use emails for different marketing material and departments without having to configure them all in outlook is a huge time saver. We have an email account for every client we work with, these emails all get diverted to a client based email account so they can be managed from one place.

IP Blocker – Another cool feature if you want to block your competitors form copying your pricing 🙂 although they can juts get another IP address some dodgy businesses owners are not that savvy. Particularly in the printer market content copying is prevalent our customers use this feature quite a lot.

Contact / Support – Another big one, were not talking about some livechat option here we want to speak with a real person by calling a manned support number. Not all support people know their stuff.

Tthe wordpress hosting companies that we work with all know wordpress in and out and they will be able to diagnose any strange issues that come we come across. The little bit extra we pay each month for a good hosting provider means we actually get good support.

We could go on and on about all the features we like but these are the main ones that we have found make a difference to us, when we get good service we like to take the time to share that experience with the world. so who do we recommend? makes sense doesn’t it, a dedicated service for us wordpress users.

To your success.