A small business site usually needs the smallest shared plan whose disk space and memory can hold it, which on these five plans means 2 GB of disk to start, stepping up through 5 GB, 10 GB and 25 GB as traffic, mail and extra websites grow. Bandwidth does not decide it, because every plan here has unlimited monthly bandwidth, so the answer comes down to disk space, memory and whether the site runs a cart. The four questions below turn that into a plan, and the rest of the page shows what each answer points to.
See Australian hosting plans Ask a questionStart with what the site has to do
A small business site usually does one of four jobs. It tells people what you do and how to contact you. It books appointments. It sells products. It hosts a login area customers use. Each of those puts a different load on a server, and the plan should be sized to the load rather than to the label on the plan.
The common mistake is buying the cheapest plan and hoping. The second most common mistake is buying the largest plan to be safe, then paying every month for capacity the site never touches. Neither is a disaster, but both cost money for no return.
Write down the jobs your site performs today. If the list is short, the decision gets easy quickly. If it is long, the rest of this page takes you through it in order.
Work out your real traffic, not your hoped-for traffic
Every hosting plan is sold on resources: disk space, memory and CPU. Traffic is what consumes them, so an honest traffic number is the first thing to establish. If you have an existing site, your analytics will show how many visits you get in a month and how many pages each visitor views. If the site is new, use a comparable business as a guide rather than a projection from a business plan.
Small business sites are usually light. A brochure site with a few hundred visits a month puts almost no strain on a shared plan. What changes the picture is a campaign, a radio mention, or a post that gets shared widely, because that load arrives in a burst rather than spread across the month.
For scale, the Starter plan carries 2 GB of disk and 1 GB of memory. That suits a small site and a modest image library, not a store.
Count the mailboxes and the domains
Email is part of hosting on cPanel, and it is the part people forget to plan for. Every mailbox on your domain takes disk space, and a decade of archived mail takes more than most people expect. If your staff never delete anything, size the plan for the mail as well as the website.
Count the addresses you actually need: info@, accounts@, and one for each person who deals with customers. Then add the second domain you registered defensively and never built on, because addon domains run from the same account here.
All our plans include unlimited email accounts, databases, addon domains and subdomains. The limit is disk, not the number of mailboxes, which matters when a business grows from three staff to ten. More detail sits on the business email hosting page.
Decide whether the site takes money
A store changes the hosting decision more than anything else on this list. A checkout writes to a database on every order, holds customer records, and has to stay responsive while someone is paying. It also fails in public: a slow checkout is a lost sale, and a checkout that errors during a promotion is worse than a site that is merely slow.
If you run WooCommerce or a similar cart, treat the store as the main workload and the rest of the site as secondary. Images are usually the largest thing on a store, and a few hundred product photos will consume more disk than the code and database combined.
If you take payments through a booking form or an invoice instead, the site itself stays light. That is a smaller hosting question than a store, even when the business is just as busy. Our ecommerce hosting page covers what a cart needs.
Which hosting plan do I need?
Four answers, one plan
Four questions, each one a choice rather than a number. Pick the answer that sounds like the business and the plan follows from it.
0 of 4 answered
Every answer and the plan it points to
The same four answers, set out in one table, so you can read a single row instead of working through the questions.
| Question | The answer you choose | Plan that answer calls for | Published disk and memory on that plan | Why that plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How much traffic does the site get in a normal month? | Quiet: under about 500 visits a month | Starter | 2 GB disk, 1 GB memory | Under about 500 visits a month puts almost no load on a shared plan. |
| How much traffic does the site get in a normal month? | Steady: about 500 to 3,000 visits a month | Business | 5 GB disk, 2 GB memory | Steady traffic wants the memory Business adds: 2 GB rather than 1 GB. |
| How much traffic does the site get in a normal month? | Busy: about 3,000 to 20,000 visits a month | Enterprise | 10 GB disk, 4 GB memory | A few thousand visits, or campaigns that send traffic in bursts, call for 10 GB of disk and 4 GB of memory. |
| How much traffic does the site get in a normal month? | Heavy: more than about 20,000 visits a month, or spikes from a campaign | Max | 25 GB disk, 8 GB memory | Heavy traffic needs the largest allocation sold without a cart: 25 GB of disk and 8 GB of memory. |
| How much email will the account hold? | A few mailboxes, and old mail gets cleared out | Starter | 2 GB disk, 1 GB memory | Mail is stored on the account's disk, so light mail leaves the smallest plan open. |
| How much email will the account hold? | Up to about ten mailboxes, keeping a year or two of mail | Business | 5 GB disk, 2 GB memory | A year or two of mail shares 5 GB of disk with the site, which is more room than the smallest plan has. |
| How much email will the account hold? | Ten or more mailboxes, or years of archived mail nobody clears | Enterprise | 10 GB disk, 4 GB memory | Years of archived mail can fill the 5 GB on Business, so the plan needs 10 GB to hold it. |
| How many websites will run on the account? | One website | Starter | 2 GB disk, 1 GB memory | One site is the single site case, so the traffic and mail answers decide. |
| How many websites will run on the account? | Two or three websites | Business | 5 GB disk, 2 GB memory | Two or three installs copy the core files, plugins and media, so the disk requirement steps up one plan. |
| How many websites will run on the account? | Four or more websites, or several installs under one domain | Enterprise | 10 GB disk, 4 GB memory | Four or more installs under one domain need the 10 GB of disk and 4 GB of memory that Enterprise adds. |
| Does the site take payments through a cart? | No. Enquiries arrive by form, phone or email, and any invoice or payment link is sent from outside the site | No change: the other three answers decide | No plan is set by this answer | A cart is the only answer that sets a plan on its own, so with no cart the other three answers decide. |
| Does the site take payments through a cart? | Yes. The site takes orders and payments through a cart such as WooCommerce | eCommerce | 50 GB disk, 12 GB memory | A cart writes to a database on every order and holds the product images, and eCommerce is the plan the store sells for online shops and catalogues. |
If your answers point at different plans, take the highest plan listed. A cart always means eCommerce, whatever the other three answers say.
What each plan gives you
All five plans run on the same platform, so what separates them is disk space, memory and what the site has to carry.
| Plan | Disk space | Memory | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 2 GB | 1 GB | a single small site with light mail |
| Business | 5 GB | 2 GB | a steady site, a second website, or a year or two of mail |
| Enterprise | 10 GB | 4 GB | busy traffic, several websites or years of stored mail |
| Max | 25 GB | 8 GB | heavy traffic or campaign spikes on a site without a cart |
| eCommerce | 50 GB | 12 GB | a cart, its product images and its database |
Prices are in AUD and exclude GST. The store lists all five plans and their current prices.
CPU allocation is listed against each plan in the store. The published CPU figures do not follow the same order as disk and memory, so this page sizes on disk and memory and leaves the CPU figure on the store listing where it is shown.
If you are still deciding whether shared hosting is the right type, types of web hosting compared sets out the alternatives; how to choose a web host covers the checks worth doing before you order.
Moving an existing site onto a new host is a separate job from choosing a plan, and website migration covers the order of steps.
Open the plan the answers point to in the store and start the order, or send us a message with the four answers and we will check the fit first. Both routes lead to the smallest plan that holds the site. If the answers put you between two plans, say so in the message and we will confirm which one to take.
Check the inclusions before you compare price
A monthly figure on its own tells you very little. The question is what the business has to buy separately once the plan is in place. On every plan here you get cPanel, unlimited monthly bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, databases and addon domains, Acronis backups taken hourly, and an AutoSSL certificate that issues and renews itself.
Backups and certificates are the two items that quietly appear as extras on budget hosting, and both are included rather than sold back to you. Hourly restore points mean a failed plugin update or a compromised site is a rollback rather than a rebuild.
Domains are separate. We register and transfer .com.au names from $25.99 a year, and you can hold the domain with us without moving the hosting. The hosting cost page breaks the figures down plan by plan.
What happens as the business grows
A hosting plan is not a permanent decision, and it should not be treated as one. A business that starts on Starter and grows into Business has not made a mistake. The mistake is staying on a plan that is visibly struggling because changing feels like a project.
Because all five plans run on the same platform, an upgrade changes the account rather than moving it between servers. Nothing is rebuilt, no DNS records change, and the mailboxes stay where they are. That is worth asking about when comparing hosts, because on some platforms the bigger plan means a migration.
The signals to watch are simple: slower admin pages, timeouts during busy periods, a disk that keeps filling with mail or images, and a site that struggles when a campaign sends traffic all at once. Pair this page with the small business hosting overview if you are still comparing hosts.
Questions people ask
How do I know which plan is right before I sign up?
Tell us what the site does, roughly how many visits it gets a month, how many mailboxes you need and whether it takes payments. We will size it from that. If you are between two plans, take the smaller one and move up if the site needs it, because the upgrade stays on the same platform.
Is email included or do I pay per mailbox?
Email is included. Every plan has unlimited email accounts on your own domain, managed from cPanel. Mailbox storage comes out of your plan's disk space, which is the figure worth checking if staff keep years of archived mail.
Where is the site actually hosted?
Domestic shared plans are served from Australian infrastructure in Sydney. Support comes from our Melbourne team by phone on 1300 565 610 during business hours, and by email at hello@webhostingpeople.com.au, which is answered outside those hours as well.
Do the prices include GST?
No. Prices are in AUD and exclude GST, which is added at the applicable rate and shown in the order before payment. Plans are billed monthly.
Can I start small and upgrade later?
Yes. All five plans sit on the same infrastructure, so an upgrade changes the resources on your account rather than moving your site. There is no rebuild and no DNS change.
Not sure which plan fits?
Tell us what the site does and how much traffic it gets. We will tell you the smallest plan that will actually hold it, even where that is the cheaper one.
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