Expert Overview
Focused on Australian Hosting Since 2010
VentraIP is an Australian web hosting company that has been open since 2010. They are privately owned and funded without any links to other hosting companies, which many people will like. They currently have more than 75,000 customers using their domain names, web hosting, and other features. You’ll be able to choose from a variety of different hosting packages offered by this company, which allows you to get what you need and even move to higher end features should it be required.
The company has received the auDA Information Security Standards (ISS) certification from Vectra Corporation. They were also named in the BRW Fast 100 2015 list, the Fast Starters 2014 list, and the SmartCompany Smart50 2015 list of companies. They are the fourth largest company by consolidated .au market share as well, indicating strong growth and customer confidence. Much of their growth has been due to acquisitions of other hosting providers in Australia over the last several years.
Uptime & Reliability
No Signs of Stability Issues
The hosting with this company has a strong reputation for being stable. They use very high quality hardware, primarily from Dell. One thing that is a little disappointing is that they only offer a 99.5% uptime guarantee. The industry standard is 99.9%, and many hosting providers offer a guarantee of even higher than that. Despite this, however, there is no indication that there are any issues related to uptime so this shouldn’t be a big deal.
Features
Quality Features Offered at Each Level
The features offered from this company are mostly standard that you would find offered by most hosting companies. They are regularly working on adding new options to help keep customers happy. This includes SSL certificates provided for all their hosting packages, free cPanel migration, hundreds of one-click installation scripts, spam and virus filtering, LiteSpeed web servers, and much more.
When looking at the hosting packages themselves you will find everything you need, but no major extras. The shared hosting packages have between 1 and 20 gigs of disk space, 250GIG, 500GIG, or unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, and more. That is for the ‘economy’ class shared hosting. They also have ‘business’ class, and WHM hosting, and other options that are fairly similar in features. The VPS level hosting comes in two levels. They offer either 50 or 100 gigs of SAS storage, 250 or 500 gigs of bandwidth, 1 or 2 gigs of DDR3 memory, and 2-4 CPU cores.
Support
Quality Tech Support 24/7
The technical support team is staffed 24/7 and do a great job at helping customers get through any type of trouble. They can be reached by phone, email, or chat and respond very quickly. Most people won’t run into any real technical issues, but should it become necessary, the support you receive is top notch. They also have a nice FAQ to answer some common questions, but it would be nice if they had more self-help material available.
Pricing
Reasonable Pricing for Shared Hosting
The shared hosting accounts are quite reasonable. They have lots of options to choose from so the price range is fairly large. For those who have a lot of experience with web hosting, this is a good thing since it makes it easy to choose a package that has exactly what is needed, and nothing extra. For those who don’t know too much about hosting, however, it can really just make the whole process overly complex and confusing. The VPS packages are $49.95 and $79.95 per month. Both of these price levels are higher than you should have to pay for what you are getting. At those prices you could get an entry level dedicated server with similar specs.
User Friendly
Mostly Easy to Use Interface
The company itself is quite user friendly and able to help you get everything setup and running quickly and easily. The one complaint some users might have is the fact that there are so many shared hosting account options. Those who are new to making websites will have difficulty figuring out the real differences between them and picking the one that they need. Overall, however, everything is easy to use with this company.
Summary
Great Hosting Company
This is one of the better hosting companies in Australia. They have a lot of different options to choose from, and for the most part their prices are reasonable. You do have to be careful to make sure you choose the right package based on your needs so you aren’t overpaying.
Pros:
- Privately Owned Company
- Lots of Happy Customers
- Good Quality Shared Hosting
Cons:
- Only a 99.5% Uptime Guaratnee
- VPS Packages are Overpriced
