Website and App Hosting

To keep your site running, you need web hosting. Without it, your site won’t load – instead, you’ll get an error page that says ‘500 Internal Server Error’.

Your website’s server is basically a big computer. It hosts all the files that make up your site – the images, the copy, the code, and so on. Without hosting, none of those files will show up for someone typing your domain name into a browser.

Your domain name is the address people type into their browsers to access your website. Ours, for example, is ionline.com.au. If you don’t have a domain, no-one can visit your site.

DNS is the middleman between your domain name and your server. When someone types in your domain, your DNS records tell their browser where to retrieve their files from. Without DNS hosting, your site won’t load – and neither will your business email. (Read more about DNS here.)

All websites need website hosting, a domain name, and DNS hosting to work.

No hosting service is completely secure. Even major hosting providers can be hacked. Our role: to implement robust cybersecurity measures that exceed the industry standard. Those measures include AI-powered firewalls, AI and human threat monitoring, and fully automated updates to minimise vulnerabilities. We also coordinate with our sister company, IT Leaders, to provision our servers in line with Australian government security benchmarks.

No, we don’t. Many marketing agencies offer ‘dedicated web hosting’ – which is really just the same hosting offered by big companies like WP Engine and SiteGround, but purchased in bulk and marked up.

Our web hosting is exactly that: ours. We own all our servers and provision them ourselves, which means we can tailor hosting to your business’s needs. That includes doing things like ramping up resources to keep your website running smoothly during high traffic periods – or tuning the server to deliver better performance for your mobile app.

When you host your site or app with us, you have access to Australian-based support. Most larger hosting providers use offshore support and AI chatbots, which can create communication problems. Many of our customers find that the ‘big provider’ experience becomes frustrating, time-consuming, and extremely expensive when something goes wrong.

We also employ a concierge approach to your hosting. That means your hosting will be handled by a dedicated team of 2 to 3 technicians – people who understand your business requirements and can optimise your hosting accordingly.

Importantly, our servers are located in Brisbane, Queensland. Your data is kept onshore and governed by Australian security laws, which can matter if you’re in possession of sensitive customer data. If you do service customers in other countries, we’ll use a CDN to make sure your site runs as fast there as it does here.

Each night, each website on those servers is automatically backed up. (App servers back up hourly.) We retain those backups for 30 days – ideal if something happens to your site and you need a point-in-time restoration.

To get technical support, call 1800 466 546 or lodge an email ticket at service@ionline.com.au.

All our hosting plans are architected to handle high traffic. Resources are caged, which means your website won’t be ‘competing’ for resources with other websites that share the same physical or virtual server.

We also provision on high-performance servers with plenty of resources – even if your site sees a sudden spike in demand, your server will generally have enough capacity to avoid bottlenecks. (That doesn’t mean a bottleneck is impossible, though, especially if your business is growing quickly.)

To identify capacity issues before they affect performance, we also deploy 24/7 automated monitoring. If you launched a marketing campaign that flooded your site with users, for example, we’d receive alerts that your server was nearing capacity. We’d then manually ramp up resources to keep your site functioning at its best.

Those approaches – even workload distribution, plenty of resources, and continuous monitoring – are enough to keep most sites running optimally. Each of our plans also includes advanced file and object caching, which improves how quickly your site responds to repeat requests.

cPanel is a portmanteau of ‘control panel’. It’s an interface that lets you manage your hosting directly from your web browsers. Within cPanel, you can:

• access and back up your website’s files
• manage your domain name and DNS records
• set up email accounts, routing and filters
• check server performance and storage.

Your web host should have cPanel or something like it enabled. If they don’t, you and your website developer will need to use a protocol like SSH or SFTP to access your site files instead. (It’s much, much simpler to just choose a host that includes cPanel in their packages.)