Pick a Host exists because the hosting review industry has a problem: most of the sites ranking on Google are optimised to sell you whichever host pays the highest commission, not whichever host actually performs well in Australia.
Why We Built This
If you have ever searched "best web hosting Australia" you have seen the same names at the top of every list: Hostinger, Bluehost, sometimes HostGator. These are almost always the hosts with the most aggressive affiliate programs. What those reviews rarely tell you is that Hostinger routes Australian customers through Singapore, and that a Sydney business on Hostinger will get a structurally slower site than one on a local provider like VentraIP or SiteGround's Sydney infrastructure - every uncached request makes a roughly 90-110ms round trip to Singapore before the server even starts work.
So we built Pick a Host to do it properly: compare hosts on the things that decide real Australian performance - server location, stack, renewal pricing, support you can actually reach - and measure the rest. Our controlled Australian speed benchmark is in progress, with probes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and measured figures are published as each test completes. We would rather publish real data late than fake data on time.
Who Writes This Site
Pick a Host is written by David Mau. David has spent 23 years building, hosting, migrating and ranking websites for Australian small businesses - which means he has opened support tickets, hit renewal invoices and untangled slow servers with most of the providers reviewed on this site. He founded Pick a Host to publish the hosting information he kept having to work out the hard way: real Australian performance, real renewal prices, and recommendations that do not bend to commission rates.
Pick a Host is independent - not a hosting company, not a reseller, and not owned by any of the hosts we review.
How We Make Money - Honest Disclosure
We earn affiliate commissions when you sign up through one of our links. Our commission rates do not determine our recommendations. The clearest evidence: VentraIP consistently ranks at or near the top of our recommendations because its Australian infrastructure and honest renewal pricing genuinely serve Australian businesses well. Managed WordPress hosts like Kinsta and WP Engine pay significantly higher commissions - we still rank them on merit.
Our Commitments
- No invented numbers. If a figure is not ours or a cited source's, it does not get published.
- Update pricing when it changes. Introductory and renewal rates both, with the date we checked.
- Show test dates on every result. You should know whether you are reading fresh data.
- Measure from Australia. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth probes - not a US server or a VPN endpoint.
See our full testing methodology for the exact process we follow, including how review scores are calculated.