Advantage Web – AWS Hosting Services

Reliable, Australian-based hosting and support for individuals, small business, and developers.

Is your hosting service throttling you?

Seamless WordPress Migration & Hosting with Amazon Web Services

Empowering businesses with worry-free deployments of WordPress or other suitable applications to the Amazon AWS Linux platform.
Delivering a robust, performant, and secure cloud environment.

Whether you’re launching a new site or moving an existing one, Advantage Web delivers setups – fast, efficiently, and tailored to your business.

Migrate, Deploy and Operate with Assurance, Precision and Confidence

Who We Work With

At Advantage Web, we love working with you, whether you’re an Individual, a Tradie, a Small Business, or a Web developer/agency wanting to take your hosting and offerings to the next level.

We specialise in end-to-end delivery of enterprise-level proven reliability without the big-agency costs. If you’ve ever felt let down by slow, overpriced, or unhelpful web hosting services, you’re in the right place.

Our approach bridges the gap between basic shared retail hosting and the complex, higher priced “large player” projects that are out of reach for you.

Why Choose Advantage Web?

Decades of IT experience and formal IT Solutions Architecture & Design across AIX listed companies, including IBM – banks, airline & transport, financial companies, telcos and more. Advantage Web brings big-company expertise to the general public and small businesses, reliably built on best business principles and IT practices.

We use:

  • Proven reliability – AWS infrastructure for performance and stability.
  • Transparency & accountability – You’ll always know what’s happening with your service.
  • Hands-on support – As the owner of Advantage Web, your project is treated like our own, rather than outsourced to contractors, ensuring every detail works as it should.
  • Scalable technology – Solutions that grow with you, from basic sites to more complex web apps.

We’ve successfully delivered hosting and AWS setups for clients in industries like psychology, art, catering, churches, finance – tax and loans, forums, help desk ticketing, publishing, health, and photography, consistently maintaining quality systems.

What Makes Advantage Web Different

I started out helping friends and small businesses frustrated with unreliable hosting and design, solving those problems ever since. For example, loss of the database during design, weak industry segment content, hacked files, “runners” unable to complete a project, false claims and extreme costs.

Our focus:

  • Solid, standards-based hosting – Built on proven Linux and AWS architectures.
  • Clear communication – No focus on tech jargon unless you wish. Transparency of issues encountered, mitigated with workarounds and co-operative, key design decisions.
  • Ethical operation – No lock-ins, hidden costs, or “mystery” system changes. You own the service.
  • Portability – Your WordPress site or app can move easily between platforms at a later date.

Every setup is designed to be robust, transparent, and future-ready.

The Problem We Noticed in the Hosting Industry

Through years of experience, we found that comparing web hosting services can be challenging. Many providers emphasise marketing claims over transparent technical details, making it difficult for clients to understand the true performance or reliability of what they’re getting.

Inconsistencies between advertised uptime and real-world results, a lack of clear service metrics and processes, breakages from other countries, and limited communication about system changes (such as downgrading the hardware or exposing users to firewall breaks during maintenance) can sometimes leave customers feeling uncertain or frustrated.

Advantage Web was founded to address these issues – offering clarity, accountability, and honesty in every aspect of web hosting and support.

Experience That Drives Real Solutions

With decades of hands-on experience across computer engineering, maintenance and problem solving, software development, and enterprise IT, Advantage Web’s founder brings a unique and true depth of technical and business insight to every project.

Leadership Through Collaboration

Across projects, success was achieved through clear thinking, teamwork, and technical precision, from modernising legacy systems to implementing network and data solutions that others said couldn’t be done. This practical, can-do approach and oversight underpins Advantage Web’s focus on small business and developer hosting, applying enterprise-level reliability to every solution, big or small.

A Proven Approach

Solving real-world IT problems has refined a philosophy based on:

  • Strong foundations – clear thinking, sound architecture, realistic planning, and precision and tested IT standards.
  • Team collaboration – helping clients and teams align technical goals with business outcomes. Our work is about you.
  • Continuous improvement – always looking ahead, anticipating dependencies, and reducing risk.

This background means Advantage Web can offer web hosting and AWS solutions built on proven principles – transparent, dependable, and designed to simply work.

With decades of hands-on experience across computing, software development, and enterprise IT, Advantage Web’s founder brings a unique and ture depth of technical and business insight to every project.

From Innovation to Implementation

Starting in the early days of personal computing, projects ranged from University sponsored projects, developing a new-generation CAAD system for a Brisbane architectural firm, leading to postgraduate studies in Computing Science and a lifelong commitment to understanding how technology works with people and businesses in a real and friendly way.

Enterprise-Grade Experience

Years with IBM and national or international technology providers opened a vast range of industries and large-scale systems including many ASX listed companies. These roles involved solving critical IT challenges, leading complex transitions, and applying rigorous standards in architecture, project management, business analysis and reliability engineering.

Leadership Through Collaboration

Across projects, success was achieved through clear thinking, teamwork, and technical precision, from modernising legacy systems to implementing network and data solutions that others said couldn’t be done. This practical, can-do approach and oversight underpins Advantage Web’s focus on small business and developer hosting, applying enterprise-level reliability to every solution, big or small.

A Proven Approach

Decades of solving real-world IT problems have refined a philosophy based on:

  • Strong foundations – sound architecture, realistic planning, and tested standards.
  • Human collaboration – helping clients and teams align technical goals with business outcomes. Our work is about you.
  • Continuous improvement – always looking ahead, anticipating dependencies, and reducing risk.

This background means Advantage Web can offer web hosting and AWS solutions built on proven principles – transparent, dependable, and designed to simply work.

DNS & Email Done Right

Your email solution  is just as important as your website. In Australia, a number of Internet providers dropped their e-mail offerings – email is a complex responsibility.

Businesses and Tradies need reliable business-grade/secure email with their own domain name.

We provide standards compliant and secure configurations for:

  • Professional domain-based email – e.g. rob@houserenovations.au
  • DNS management – e.g. SSL certificates, email authentication & secure delivery, protections against spam or denial of services.
  • DNS transfers – transfers for domains or records to known/appropriate registrars.
  • Integration with trusted providers – Microsoft Exchange, AWS WorkMail, VentraIP Axigen, Proton Mail, etc.

AWS Services We Offer

We handle the full management of Amazon AWS services so you can focus on your business, including:

  • Linux Hosting  – fast, stable, and secure, with performance and security configurations.
  • Data Backups – day-to-day and full disaster recovery.
  • Integration with AWS Services – e.g. authentications, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) as required, cloud storage.
  • Performance tuning & Security Hardening – including country and “bad actor” blocking, uptime monitoring.
  • Maintenance – e.g. security updates, and future life-cycle upgrades.

The Advantage Web Service

We are a local, hands-on partner based in Brisbane, working closely with the public, senior IT professionals and business owners in Australia.

Our Service offers:

  • Personal support – direct communication and collaboration.
  • Proven AWS expertise – from setup to optimisation.
  • Transparency – honest communications. You always own your data and systems.
  • Reliability – architectures built for performance and uptime.

Every project, big or small, gets full attention, professionalism and care.

Ready to power your website or app with AWS?

Let’s chat about how Advantage Web can make your hosting faster, safer, and simpler, with a genuine, local partner who cares about your success.

You! Do you just want to up the game, or solve a problem? I am extending this service to new clients along side existing, with the aim of partnering with smaller-scale web developers, as well as individuals, trades, and small business, to take advantage of available capacity for delivery of this service. I have worked on AWS projects with smallbizwebsolutions.com.au for many years, and my own web cllients.

I like to work with good people. As a Solutions Architect when working with IBM and Salmat Australia, I have loved to sit down with anyone, like you. At times we say things that even seem silly, when they turn out to be key. What you take for granted can be a major business benefit to others.

This service stands in the gap between lower end retail offerings of cPanel or diverse VPS shared services and large developers where pricing is out of scope for you, typically for small business, sole traders and individuals.

I began working for friends and smaller businesses who approached me with serious website problems and frustrations since 2005, and formally with an ABN since 2012. I did not like the frustrations people discussed for web hosting services with non-accountability, over-pricing, poor or failed IT systems, unhelpful Help Desks, false claims, lack of standard practices, slow or broken websites, inability to deliver bread and butter content such as common sense SEO, and more.

This exposed an apparent lack of clarity and evident regulations in Australian web services and IT practices. It was not possible to compare services due to focus on marketing content, leading to a need to create and test accounts across various providers. A services could market virtual 100% uptime, in contradiction to user experiences and forums. There was no evidence of data center incident reports, metrics or penalties for “SLA” downtime. Companies “did things” to a website without notification, such as moving to slower, older hardware, discontinuing a service without due care, break upstream firewalls during maintenance, frequency of lost database connections, using blacklisted shared IP addresses (email failure and reputation damage), inability to assist if another country was having a weather event such as a hurricane, locking people into services such as making it impossible to use lower cost SSL certificates, or questionably breaking Australian law by demanding Drivers License identification.

My great grandfather  George was a champion rifle shooter in Australia and England. My great great grandfather William owned what we may liken to a mini-Harrods retail store in Brisbane. Our heritage is to enjoy what we do and aim for the best.

Advantage Web is owned and run by myself here in Brisbane. I have a senior IT background.  I have regular meetings with my senior-qualified IT colleague in Sydney who specialises in software development, and websites with memberships/events/payments/shops for major Australian clients.

My current project with my colleague is AWS Linux hosting and testing for a financial app written with Code Igniter, and ticketing software. These use Debian and Linux2023. We have another project with AWS and OpenLiteSpeed.

My own clients have all used AWS Linux (or Lightsail) with variations of Debian, and Linux2/2023 (or previously Ubuntu or Cent OS).

WordPress and Domain Registration transfers have been to or from a diverse range of providers,  including several Australian listed hosting providers, and various registrars. These have typically used cPanel services for the sites I have engaged in. Industries have included psychology, art works, food catering, churches, associations, finance and tax, health, publishing, photography, software sales.

I maintain my clients consistently. With my solutions and wide range of IT skills, particularly in Unix/Linux it is something I really like to do, and this contributes to others in a meaningful way. I have no issues with who administers a service, or future transfers or sunset.  WordPress sites and developer apps are readily portable to other platforms or developers in line with content backup. I have never lost or been unable to recover an IT system despite some cliff hangers.

Because of my detailed and long-term involvement in small to large scale projects, I know how to identify proper solutions, remove gaps, what to be wary of, how people work and think in businesses, IT, and diverse industries from the shop floor through to managers and CEOs, both nationally and overseas. I am presenting this information not to boast, but to give a better idea of my background, assuring yourself, and how this ensures lowest possible risk for yourself, your business goals expressed online, and satisfying best outcomes that are solid, robust, reliable, an ongoing. I treat each project as if it were my own and insist on a finished product across all of its components. This is supported with transparency and enjoyable, good co-operation with you or your project’s contacts.

TRACK RECORD & DEDICATION TO THIS TECHNOLOGY WORK & INDUSTRY

In 1982 I printed and studied the entire Hex code for the Apple operating system, wrote a program for extruding 2D building plans into a 3D wire-frame, and wrote a Pascal program to analyse internal housing temperatures.

In 1988 I developed a new, emerging CAAD system for a leading Brisbane architectural firm and completed a Graduate Diploma in Computing Science at QUT.

In 1993 I was tutored from a company in Texas on the IBM AIX operating system and RS6000 hardware.

These years and on covered a broad range of IT systems – soldering, printers, routers, modems, mainframe, AS/4000, Wang, Dec, HP, Sun, SCO Unix, Red Hat linux, Web services.

Larger projects ranged across many companies, industries and partners, such as Bank West transition from EDI Australia Post, NAB mainframe to Oracle, Qantas Avalon maintenance, Banking online statements, Optus mobile billing and so many more, either with IBM Australia or IBM Global Services. While at Salmat Australia P/L, I worked directly with ANZ Bank’s solutions architects, ING in Taiwan, Westpac, Amex, Linfox and more, and developed a concept solution for an email project to be provisioned to all Australians.

The IBM years mentored in best business practices, sales and IT standards, as demanded by large companies such as American Express, where I later provided a team-based solution to avert a $100,000 monthly penalty. I had access to resources that were not available to other companies, worked with specialists who reverse engineered legacy data and software, solved critical IT problems, managed road shows, presented at conferences such as in Philadelphia, and had detailed technical training in places such as Boulder, Tokyo, and Wiltshire in England.

All of this lets me see what is going on in IT and diverse industries and projects – realistically looking at the scope and goals of individuals, trades, small business and projects related to provisioning on proven technology platforms. I’d like to hear from you if my service may offer you its distinct benefits, either as a business or personal concern, or as a developer.

Some real-life project examples:

Qantas needed to move legacy systems from a Unisys mainframe. One project required data reverse engineering. My contacts in USA were able to do this work with a planned schedule and progress evidence. Managers got cold feet and threatened to pull the plug having no alternative. The project completed on time, successfully.

Qantas needed to transition their aircraft maintenance system from mainframe SNA connectivity to Ethernet. At that time there was only one hardware product and scripting I needed to write for a solution. A senior engineer yelled at me more than once saying my solution would not and could not work. I checked the facts, and it did work. Fly on Qantas!

Projects are a team effort. I would facilitate people to enjoy running with their own expertise. Everyone would hop on board. People often just needed someone to be there, to say yes, we can do this, and here is our roadmap. Sometimes we would insert flexibility into a plan, but this was unpopular with those more rigid.

American Express wished to place advertisement images on the back of their customer statements. Our own programmers did not know how to produce the logic for it. I would write notes, even at night beside my bed, and finalised the algorithms in an airport waiting area.

A major Bank wanted a solution to consolidate and cover every department’s online or written communications with the public. A competitor offered pricing for off the shelf products, omitting many requirements across the entire bank. In a high level design meeting, people knew what they had to do but didn’t know how.  I suggested using a model that I had learnt about when studying computing at University. That is what we did, enabling the Bank and ourselves to go to town on it.

These are a few examples of many previous projects that engaged all manner of people and their specialisations. There was only one client I ever refused to work for due to bullying and unconscionable practices, and one minor project that technically did not have a solution.

I like to see what we can do without having arrived there. Many managers are not able to make this jump or thereby make critical decisions. I kind of see ahead and across the components and dependencies involved, always looking for detail so we are not missing something. Client contacts and needs of stakeholders are vital.

Good, foundational work is always trustworthy. Computers have to work and do what we tell them. While there is always risk of failures, such as a network hardware card shorting out, or a hard drive not sending “fix-me” alerts, my architectural approach is inline with industry standards that reduce risk and save on costs.

All of this work has made end-to-end development and delivery of smaller website projects simpler, based on principles of business analysis, project management, business principles and IT standards, respect of others and so forth. And yes, a bit of diplomacy and psychology involved.

Domain Name System (DNS) management and fast, reliable, secure e-mails are integral parts of Web Services that Advantage Web constructs as part of an overall solution. Remove the Turtle in the room! Free services are helpful but not a business standard.

In Australia, a number of Internet providers have dropped their e-mail offerings. For example, TPG and Aussie Broadband.

Businesses and tradies need robust e-mail using their own domain names. This means more than run-of-the-mill free cPanel e-mail, or generic public emails such as Gmail. And, standard anti-spam filtering is not enough.

Serious e-mail providers spend millions of dollars in development of their systems.

Strong, secure, reliable e-mail is offered by the big players such as Microsoft, and Google Business.

There are other services with specialist offerings such as Proton Mail. However, will your service sync emails correctly with your PC/Mobile e-mail client, such as Outlook?

Microsoft Exchange is not high cost compared to other services. WordPress emails must connect securely to MS rather than using what is fast becoming legacy use of SMTP connections. We also ensure DNS records are in place for DKIM, SPF and DMARC security.

Amazon AWS offers a WorkMail service that is easier to use than MS Exchange – no mountains of configurations involved – but it is not known to integrate calendars meaningfully.

AWS also has starter’s help at virtually no cost using SES email forwarding. You can forward emails to your primary email address such as Gmail, but replies are via this same address, not the domain name.

We sometimes get excited about using other email services that at the end of the day can have serious issues and disappointments. For example, performance issues, irregularities, common configurations for all, freezing, and missing subject or content summaries.

Domain Name System (DNS) management for every project.

The DNS provider should have a good reputation. This is about your domain name. You may even move your registration name servers (or pointers) to Amazon AWS Route53 to increase resilience to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

I try to restrain technical jargon with clients – but more than happy to talk IT with developers or Linux folks.

I have developed a comprehensive range of AWS Services over many years that consistently support WordPress websites or developer apps.

These include:

Account billing configurations (your credit card) – where invoices go, and budget alerts.

Create, update, restore EC2 Linux instances in Linux 2023 and Debian. I prefer optimised Linux2023. An app may require Debian. This process creates security keys for secure Shell access. New instances are configured as standard or encrypted depending on your needs. After monitoring the system and being happy with ongoing use, we may purchase a Reserved Instance to give a significant hardware discount each year. Debian and AWS Linux are free operating systems. We install either x86 or ARM architectures.

EC2 services include security group configurations, use of static IP4 addresses, snapshot backups (for fast disaster recovery), admin Linux SSH logins and FileZilla file uploads/downloads for iMac PC’s, or Windows PuTTY if required.

IAM is configured to provide certain permissions to the service, and additional configurations if using SES email, or root@domain.com postfix internal emails to external addresses. This includes 2FA or Passkeys.

SES is configured to provide AWS SMTP user/password key pairs if required. Depending on how e-mail is constructed, it may involve verifying domain names and e-mail addresses.

If using SES to forward e-mails, rather than deploying MS Exchange or another service, Lambda scripts in SDK3 are provided, then linked to SES e-mail rules that send emails to an S3 Bucket, filtering for spam etc., and forwarded to you. This involves further IAM configuration. These e-mails are stored to an inbound email archive. E-mail activity is logged in Cloudwatch – useful for debugging. SES e-mail is located in Oregon, USA.

(I have spent several years researching and testing privately managed Linux e-mail services, and will not provide these due to code issues, security problems, high CPU/Memory use, failures, update problems,and  loss of email – the list is large.)

If using MS Exchange, it is possible to archive both inbound and “Sent” outbound emails if you have a spare domain name we can add to MS Exchange accepted domains.

S3 Buckets can be used to store various documents and images on the AWS cloud instead of your server. Super cheap and lightning fast, offloading processing. WordPress Media Library images remain on your server.

AWS DNS management involves Route53. We can use other registrars as well.

We configure postfix for our proprietary scripts. For instance, if we detect there was an out of memory error, (how hard are you hammering the system – ouch) postfix sends an e-mail to the administrator (or anyone) of the problem.

If using SES e-mail forwarding, we configure WordPress for your Contact Form. Otherwise, to another SMTP service, or a secured service that uses OAUTH2 instead of SMTP. MS Exchange and Gmail will use OAUTH2 security. We do not generally configure MTA-TLS (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security ) host to host e-mail encryption, (reducing man-in-the-middle interception) but can look at it. My personal MS Exchange email uses this.)

Various Shell Scripts are used in crontab scheduling to heath check the system. We can automate snapshots, operating system updates, WordPress (or other software) backups, and a range of WordPress plugins at nominated intervals. Realistically we may have issues after WordPress plugin and theme updates – seems to be the norm with WordPress, as this relates to third party authors. Scripting automates free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. Paid certificates need manual installation.

If a system is CPU overloaded, AWS provides Burst CPU to overcome an immediate problem, rather than giving website visitors an error message. We examine CPU and Memory usage if there is an issue. If we over-use memory, the scripts should pick this up, or can be modified for certain unknown errors and restart services so the system is not frozen. We have seen chronic behaviour on overloaded cPanel services – chiefly from hackers flooding a system, or the client using too many domains, subdomains and e-mail on the one platform.

Advantage Web installs “iptables” to block nominated countries, adding additional blocking commands to assist, such as hackers opening and not closing ports. We can block domain names, other IP address ranges if critical, and so on. We cannot impose certain restrictions where this leads to unintended blocking.

We can add additional hard disk (GP3) or NFS mounted disk (EFS).

We can install a CDN (Content Delivery Network) if you need edge servers to other countries. Typically, WordPress using the W3TC plugin, and in AWS, the Cloudfront and Certificate Manager services. For instance, https://cdn.mydomain.com/mylogo.png rather than https://mydomain.com/mylogo.png.

These are the range of suitable AWS services to run individual or small business websites.

Advantage Web
Let’s Bridge the Gap between cheap and expensive, regular folks and city elite!

Advantage Web
Let’s Bridge the Gap between cheap and expensive, regular folks and city elite!

Advantage Web
Let’s Bridge the Gap between cheap and expensive, regular folks and city elite!