As we are running through the process of increasing the speed of all our websites, we thought we would compare the overall speed of the four Australian web hosts, Jumba, Netregistry, Crucial Paradigm and Melbourne IT. On all four hosts we have clients running WordPress. When you look at the time taken to load a website, a speedy response from the server is critical to keeping loading times down. We ran a test using Page Load analyser, ran the test five times and took the average.
Something worth noting is that the first test invariably returned a result of a few seconds to a response, as it appears the servers were shifting resources.
| Connection time (ms) | Time to first byte (ms) | Download Time (ms) | Total Time (ms) | |
| Netregistry | 341 | 662 | 341 | 1344 |
| Melbourne IT | 190 | 609 | 380 | 1179 |
| Crucial Paradigm | 323 | 641 | 647 | 1611 |
| Jumba | 323 | 749 | 647 | 1719 |
Melbourne IT charge enough for their products, $100+ for domain names and $30+ for basic hosting, you would hope that you can get something positive in return.
So which is good then? What do you recommend? Details please.
Its insane how much MelbourneIT charge for domain registration. Massive rip off when you consider you can register a .com.au from crazydomains.com.au for $12 year.
When it comes to buying web hosting, id never recommend an Australian based hosting company because value for money doesn’t compare to US based hosting companies such as Hostgator.
Also never purchase your domain and hosting from the same company because it can get messy trying to move to another company as they have control of you.
@ Aaron, I would not agree for hosting on US based host. I’ve been a customer of BlueHost and other US based provider and the speed is significantly slower than major Aussie based host. The reason for staying with BH is because we provide some FREE hosting to clients of web development those were just information sites. For clients who willing to pay and with eCommerce (shopping cart) we always host with our Aussie partners.
For a balance between $$$ and Speed, Crucial seems to be a fair choice. Also added that both Customer Services are excellent for both BH and Crucial.
Jumba has gotten worse, I am now seeing a 1750ms time to first byte on my server. I am looking for a new host but this time am prepared to pay for a faster speed.