Pricing Overview

Pricing discussions are always a practical dialogue around affordability and the level of service required. Individuals may have modest budgets for establishing a site on a Linux Cloud platform, while businesses typically handle costs with more flexibility.

Ultimately, we aim for comfort, good value, and satisfaction. Our HOME page shows a pricing guideline.

Hosting & Maintenance

VPS Cloud Hosting maintenance combines our proprietary automation with manual maintenance. We automate tasks where it is proven and safe, through scripting, with manual works via your agreement, such as twice per year for operating system security updates for clients not managed by their own agency. This is a low cost hourly rate, (at time of writing) of AUD $35.00/hour, no GST. We prefer payments via PayPal, but can review with you.

Again, we prefer you maintain WordPress as you currently do,  but may discuss. WordPress theme and plugin updates can cause issues requiring temporary rollbacks or fixes. Operating systems such as Linux 2023 or Debian 13 change over time, and can be rebuilt at end-of-life cycles if requested. This work is not extensive.

Hardware changes—like expanding disk space, S3 Cloud file storage, or upgrading CPU/RAM are added, reasonable costs. New installations include a free monitoring period to review CPU, memory, and database load (e.g., MySQL, PHP, swap space). It is a good idea to make use of a test system with some cients before going live.

Websites are backed up as “snapshots” for disaster recovery, with user-defined schedules for database(s) and files to S3 Cloud storage.

Users will need to familiarize themselves with their account – Amazon billing, two-factor authentication, and other services such as Google Analytics, or email provider settings.

Associated Costs

Separate from hosting, you’ll need to fund:

  • Annual domain renewals

  • SSL certificates (free non-commercial versions available and preferred)

  • Email services

We automate the renewal of free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates (for https://).  Should a business require a paid certificate, and due to changes in the industry, these need automated renewals usually via the provider at a cost, because at some point renewals will be every 47  days. This gives opportunity to vendors to charge.

We are aware of increased load on any service once we add multiple domains and subdomains. We have to be reasonable about this. We have seen chronic overloads on servers as clients push beyond the technical limits on their paid plans. We will work towards best practices and industry standards. Your service provides for multiple domains in the price. This is not a cPanel service where you may add WordPress databases and domains yourself, unless you have the skills to do so.

AWS Pricing

Amazon AWS operates on pay-as-you-go (On Demand) pricing.

  • Typical small business hosting costs: AUD $12–$15/month +  approx. $90/year for a t4g.micro instance (includes static IPv4). This should be quite suitable, for example, with a food catering business or art work site.

  • Doubling RAM (t4g.small) roughly doubles cost to ~$180/year. We monitor your system for regular and peak loads to see if this is needed. We encourage the annual hardware discount which is either annual or every three years.

  • During testing, some costs may temporarily be incurred. An annual budget of  approx. $250 is a good indicative estimate, excluding our fees.

By contrast, “Aussie” cPanel providers charge around $300–$350/year for shared hosting and $1,000–$3,500/year for VPS services.

Large Data Centers such as Amazon (or other outsourced services) maintain strict SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for Government and Enterprise Business which we are able to leverage for ourselves, driven by their own internal metrics, re-training actions, and penalties. We believe other smaller hosting providers may market SLAs that have a disconnect with user experiences, perhaps not driven by the same standards, including harsh penalties.

We are happy to clarify the way pricing works with Amazon AWS, and ourselves.

Additional Services

CDN (Content Delivery Network) use is optional but beneficial for global reach. Setup takes roughly half a day with a free AWS SSL certificate for a CDN URL  – e.g. https://cdn.mydomain.com.au/wp-content/uploads/logo.png.webp. Amazon’s CDN performs best when paired with AWS hosting.

Once your system resources are confirmed, AWS offers Reserved Instances for discounted annual pricing as mentioned above. Additional charges apply for disk storage (EBS or EFS), data transfer, and Route53 DNS management (USD $0.51/month), which also provides basic DDoS protection prior to traffic entering the servers.

S3 cloud storage provides cost-effective, high-speed backup, and offloads server processing from your website. This is good for large files like video or business documents.  General-purpose GP3 disks go with the default system (at a cost) include built-in redundancy. Amazon AWS line items all the monthly costs.

AWS also includes BURST CPU capacity to prevent downtime under traffic spikes – no client shock 503 errors. If sustained load increases, scaling up hardware tier is simple.

Unlike some providers that force large minimum disk sizes (e.g., 40GB – which may be in older hardware), AWS lets you pay only for what you use (e.g., 15GB) on current hardware. Services like RAID or load balancing are available to larger organisations, but add roughly $700+/year for an introductory level and are unnecessary for most small to mid-sized sites.

AWS servers are based in Australia (Sydney/Melbourne), providing local data residency, current hardware/software, dedicated IPs, and consistent database performance.

Alternative Platforms & Pricing

If you’re seeking alternatives:

  • Akamai/Linode: Entry-level hosting from AUD $145/year, next tier $285/year – suitable for moderate workloads.

  • VentraIP Australia: cPanel hosting with email and local data residency; performance may vary due to shared IPs.

Both Akamai and VentraIP host in Sydney, while AWS remains our preferred business-grade platform due to its performance, security, uptime, flexibility, and reliability.