Welcome to our first empirical analysis of the fastest Australian web hosts for December 2017!
We’ve put ourselves and other leading Aussie web hosts to the test to determine whose home pages have the fastest backend performance, demonstrate the highest technical proficiency, and provide the best user experience.
Methodology
We used the GTMetrix API to measure the performance of the home page of the following Australian web hosts: Hilenium, Panthur, Digital Pacific, Ventra IP, GoDaddy, HostGator, Crazy Domains, Host Papa, Crucial, Prompt Web Hosting, Domain Hosting Shop, Net Registry, Webcity, Hosting Australia, Melbourne IT, Zuver, Rack Servers, NetVirtue, iShout Hosting and Web 24.
Tests were conducted from GTMetrix’s Sydney location over a 10 minute period on Friday December 15. All tests ran successfully except for VentraIP and Zuver, which errored and were excluded from the analysis.
We investigated the following metrics for the purpose of this analysis:
- Google PageSpeed Score as a measure of the technical proficiency (i.e. how well it is built)
- Backend Duration as a measure of server performance
- RUM Speed Index as a measure of user experience.
We converted each host’s raw scores for each metric into a percentile to measure performance relative to each other. These percentiles are displayed as positive and negative differences from the 50th percentile, as follows:
- +50 score is the highest score possible
- 0 is average
- -50 is the lowest score possible.
Results
Performance Matrix
The follow matrix displays the performance of the 18 Australian web hosts relative to each other, where the:
- x-axis is the backend speed (higher is better)
- y-axis is the technical proficiency (higher is better)
- bubble size is the overall user experience (larger is better).
You can hover over each bubble to see the full details for each host.
Backend Duration
The following table shows the relative rating for each host and their backend duration in milliseconds.
NetVirtue had the best performance oaths metric with an 8 millisecond response time, followed closely by Hilenium (15ms), Domain Hosting Shop (18ms) and NetRegistry (18ms).
| Rank | Web Host | Rating | Raw Score |
| 1 | NetVirtue | 50 | 8 |
| 2 | Hilenium | 44 | 15 |
| 3 | Domain Hosting Shop | 36 | 18 |
| 4 | Net Registry | 36 | 18 |
| 5 | Melbourne IT | 28 | 20 |
| 6 | Host Papa | 22 | 22 |
| 7 | Panthur | 17 | 37 |
| 8 | Web 24 | 11 | 62 |
| 9 | Rack Servers | 6 | 99 |
| 10 | Prompt Web Hosting | 0 | 115 |
| 11 | GoDaddy | -6 | 286 |
| 12 | Webcity | -11 | 398 |
| 13 | Hosting Australia | -17 | 411 |
| 14 | Crazy Domains | -22 | 460 |
| 15 | Digital Pacific | -28 | -28 |
| 16 | iShout Hosting | -33 | 500 |
| 17 | Crucial | -39 | 678 |
| 18 | HostGator | -44 | 919 |
Technical Proficiency
The Google Pagespeed score was used as a proxy measure of each web host’s home page technical proficiency.
Again, the winner was NetVirtue (95) closely followed by Hilenium (91) and iShout Hosting (90). We’ve previously had our site score 100 on Google Pagespeed but, unfortunately, some third party plugins we rely on (via Segment.com) drag down our score (but it’s worth it given the improved customer insight these plugins provide!).
| Rank | Web Host | Rating | Raw Score |
| 1 | NetVirtue | 50 | 95 |
| 2 | Hilenium | 44 | 91 |
| 3 | iShout Hosting | 39 | 90 |
| 4 | Host Papa | 33 | 85 |
| 5 | Web 24 | 28 | 80 |
| 6 | Domain Hosting Shop | 22 | 76 |
| 7 | Rack Servers | 17 | 75 |
| 8 | Melbourne IT | 8 | 72 |
| 9 | Hosting Australia | 8 | 72 |
| 10 | GoDaddy | 0 | 64 |
| 11 | Net Registry | -8 | 63 |
| 12 | HostGator | -8 | 63 |
| 13 | Crazy Domains | -17 | 59 |
| 14 | Crucial | -22 | 58 |
| 15 | Prompt Web Hosting | -28 | 56 |
| 16 | Panthur | -36 | 51 |
| 17 | Webcity | -36 | 51 |
| 18 | Digital Pacific | -44 | 46 |
User Experience
RUM Speed index is used as a proxy measure of user experience.
The winner here is Domain Hosting Shop (249), followed by Hilenium (313) and Panthur (343).
| Rank | Web Host | Rating | Raw Score |
| 1 | Domain Hosting Shop | 50 | 249 |
| 2 | Hilenium | 44 | 313 |
| 3 | Panthur | 39 | 343 |
| 4 | Rack Servers | 33 | 809 |
| 5 | Crucial | 28 | 897 |
| 6 | Hosting Australia | 22 | 921 |
| 7 | Host Papa | 17 | 998 |
| 8 | NetVirtue | 11 | 1034 |
| 9 | Prompt Web Hosting | 6 | 1066 |
| 10 | Net Registry | 0 | 1080 |
| 11 | GoDaddy | -6 | 1103 |
| 12 | iShout Hosting | -11 | 1106 |
| 13 | Crazy Domains | -17 | 1196 |
| 14 | Web 24 | -22 | 1298 |
| 15 | Digital Pacific | -28 | 1425 |
| 16 | Melbourne IT | -33 | 1521 |
| 17 | Webcity | -39 | 2017 |
| 18 | HostGator | -44 | 4219 |
Overall Ranking
So, you may be wondering who ‘won’ the crown of the fastest Australian web host in December 2017.
To determine this, we calculated the average rank for each web host across all three metrics…
And the winner is….
Hilenium (us!) with an average rank of 2.0 across all three metrics, followed by NetVirtue and Domain Hosting Shop in equal second place with an average rank of 3.3.
| Rank | Web Host | Average Rank |
| 1 | Hilenium | 2.0 |
| =2 | NetVirtue | 3.3 |
| =2 | Domain Hosting Shop | 3.3 |
| 4 | Host Papa | 5.7 |
| 5 | Rack Servers | 6.7 |
| 6 | Net Registry | 8.3 |
| 7 | Panthur | 8.7 |
| 8 | Web 24 | 9.0 |
| 9 | Hosting Australia | 9.3 |
| 10 | Melbourne IT | 9.7 |
| 11 | iShout Hosting | 10.3 |
| 12 | GoDaddy | 10.7 |
| 13 | Prompt Web Hosting | 11.3 |
| 14 | Crucial | 12.0 |
| 15 | Crazy Domains | 13.3 |
| 16 | Webcity | 15.3 |
| =17 | Digital Pacific | 16.0 |
| =17 | Host Gator | 16.0 |
Download
To be fully transparent, we are making the raw data used in this analysis available for download in CSV format.
If you wish to access this data, please complete the following form and we’ll send you a link.