IInet.net.au Review 2026. Is iinet.net.au good web hosting in Australia?

📄 Editorial Review

(3*) 🔧 Services: Web HostingTelecom
iiNet is best seen today as a major Australian telecom and internet brand that still happens to run a hosting platform, rather than a dedicated hosting provider that also sells connectivity. Founded in 1993 and now part of TPG Telecom, they’ve grown from a Perth dial-up outfit into a national ISP with NBN, fibre, VDSL2, cable, fixed wireless and mobile services – and hosting has come along for the ride as a bolt-on service for existing customers.

Their Hosting & Domains range is still officially active and documented: the Customer Relationship Agreement and pricing tables (shared across iiNet, Westnet and other brands) explicitly list shared hosting, domains, VPS and "Business Cloud" as current products as of late 2025. But the platform feels conservative and legacy-style: traditional shared hosting, fixed-spec VPS, a metered VM cloud, Exchange email and SSL reselling, with modest resource limits and little of the automation or developer-centric tooling you see from modern specialist hosts.

For Australian businesses that already rely on iiNet for internet and phones, that can be perfectly fine. Everything – line rental, NBN, domains, hosting, email, SSL – lands on one bill and is handled under one CRA. For someone coming in purely for hosting, however, iiNet’s offer looks like a solid but dated option that trades convenience and brand familiarity for smaller quotas and higher overage charges than many newer alternatives.

PRICE & COST

iiNet prices hosting and domains in Australian dollars, generally GST-inclusive, so domestic customers don’t get caught by surprise at checkout.

Domains & DNS add-ons

The domain catalogue is compact but covers the essentials for Australian businesses:

• .com.au / .net.au – sold in 2-year blocks at about AUD 22 per year (minimum AUD 44).
• .org.au, .asn.au, .id.au – slightly cheaper, reflecting not-for-profit and personal use.
• Generic TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info) – around AUD 30 per year.
• Premium/other (.mobi, .co.nz, .co.uk, .asia) – higher pricing, with some requiring multi-year terms (.mobi/.co.nz around AUD 75/year, .co.uk as a 2-year commitment).

Domains are registered via partner registrars (Melbourne IT, DistributeIT, Domainz and others) but managed through iiNet’s own account environment.
DNS and mail-relay extras are billed annually:

• DNS Hosting – AUD 25 / year
• Secondary DNS Hosting – AUD 25 / year
• Mail Relay – AUD 65 / year
• Bundle (DNS + Mail Relay) – AUD 90 / year

These suit customers running their own infrastructure but wanting iiNet as a secondary DNS/mail provider.

Shared Web Hosting

The shared "Web Hosting 1–3" plans are straightforward and a bit old-school:

• Web Hosting 1 – AUD 16 / month or AUD 160 / year
• Web Hosting 2 – AUD 19 / month or AUD 190 / year
• Web Hosting 3 – AUD 30 / month or AUD 300 / year

Across the range you get:

• 10–20 GB disk space
• 100–200 GB monthly traffic
• A small pool of MySQL databases
• Choice of Windows or Linux
• Parallels (Plesk-style) control panel
• File manager and basic backup capability
• Support for common CMS platforms like WordPress and Joomla

A key detail is bandwidth overage: excess traffic is charged at about AUD 0.06 per MB – that’s roughly AUD 60 per GB, which is very steep by modern hosting standards. Any site with variable or spiky traffic needs to be monitored carefully.

SSL Certificates

iiNet resells commercial SSL products at typical enterprise-style prices:

• QuickSSL Premium (single hostname) – AUD 139 / year
• True BusinessID (two hostnames) – AUD 199 / year
• True BusinessID EV – AUD 249 / year
• True BusinessID Wildcard – AUD 699 / year

These are natural add-ons for customers who want everything – connectivity, hosting and SSL – from the same provider.

Email Hosting & Hosted Exchange

iiNet separates hosting-style email from their broadband-bundled legacy mailboxes:

• Business Email / Business Pro – per-mailbox monthly pricing, with options to increase storage via "Pro Plus" upgrades (e.g. 2 GB, 5 GB). Includes webmail, spam/virus filtering, mobile access and standard groupware features.
• Hosted Exchange – starts around AUD 2.95 / mailbox / month for a 3 GB mailbox and AUD 6.95 for 25 GB, with Outlook Web Access, POP/IMAP, and mobile sync (ActiveSync/MAPI). Some plans include desktop Outlook licences at extra cost.

This fits small businesses that want email on their own domain but don’t want to maintain Exchange servers themselves.

VPS & Business Cloud

The VPS product line is small and decidedly "legacy VPS" rather than cloud:

• VPS 1 – AUD 29.95 / month, ~512 MB RAM, 1 GHz CPU, 20 GB storage, 50 GB traffic
• VPS 2 – AUD 49.95 / month, ~1 GB RAM, 2 GHz CPU, 30 GB storage, 100 GB traffic
• VPS 3 – AUD 99.95 / month, ~2 GB RAM, 3 GHz CPU, 50 GB storage, 250 GB traffic

These are suitable for simple applications, internal tools or low-traffic web apps; they’re not pitched as high-performance nodes. Customers are responsible for OS patching, security and backups unless they bolt on managed services.
The Business Cloud platform is more flexible but still quite traditional. Instead of buying a single fixed VPS, you choose one of four cloud tiers (Cloud 1–4) with minimum monthly charges from about AUD 29 up to AUD 349, and within each tier you pay:

• Per GHz-hour of CPU
• Per GB-hour of RAM
• Per GB of storage (around AUD 0.18 / GB)
• Per GB of bandwidth (around AUD 0.12 / GB)
• AUD 3 / month per external IP

Windows VMs incur hourly licensing fees; Linux is free. It’s a metered VM platform aimed at technically comfortable teams rather than a polished, "click-and-go" cloud like you get from hyperscalers.

Refunds & Payments

iiNet’s hosting follows the same Customer Relationship Agreement as their internet services:

• Charges are billed in advance or arrears depending on type; overpayments for cancelled services can be refunded on a pro-rata basis.
• There is no prominent "30-day money-back guarantee" for hosting plans; cancellations and refunds are handled under general CRA rules, not hosting-specific satisfaction guarantees.

Payment methods include direct debit and credit card, with potential surcharges on card payments. Everything is managed via the Toolbox customer portal or through standard invoicing, and the usual late-payment and recovery-cost clauses apply.

DATA CENTER

• Hosting & Domains services are operated by iiNet and related TPG group companies inside Australia and governed by Australian law.
• IP addresses remain the property of iiNet or its suppliers and can be changed; customers get temporary use only, with obligations around abuse and security.
• Security clauses highlight that customers must not interfere with iiNet systems or networks, and iiNet can suspend or terminate services in case of abuse, malicious traffic or security incidents.

For shared hosting, backup is described in simple terms (two backups are mentioned in plan specs) and iiNet explicitly tells customers to maintain their own copies of important data. For VPS and Business Cloud, backups, patching and hardening are entirely the customer’s job unless they contract extra management.

✍️ Customer Support

Support is built around iiNet’s existing ISP structure rather than a separate hosting-only helpdesk.
Key points:

• Phone support:
  General Support & Billing via 13 22 58 / * Business sales/support via 13 19 17
• Online: Toolbox account portal for billing and service management / Online forms and support pages under iiNet’s standard help site
• Business support: Hosting, VPS and Business Cloud sit under "iiNet Business" support models, giving access to more specialised teams for corporate customers.

For email hosting and Hosted Exchange, the terms emphasise that technical support goes to the account holder, not directly to end-users. That’s a traditional ISP stance: they’ll help the business or IT contact, who in turn supports their staff or clients.

Response times, escalation paths and service levels are framed at CRA level, not in a separate hosting SLA. In practice, hosting customers tap into the same support organisation they already use for their NBN or fibre connection, which is convenient if you want a single point of contact for connectivity and hosting, but less tailored than a dedicated hosting NOC.

🔨 Control Panel

For shared hosting, iiNet uses a Parallels (Plesk-style) control panel on both Linux and Windows servers. This gives a familiar environment for many users:

• Site and domain management
• Web-based file manager and FTP account configuration
• MySQL database creation and basic admin
• Email account/forwarder management where included
• One-click support for major CMS platforms like WordPress and Joomla

For VPS and Business Cloud, customers are given login details to a more technical management interface that deals in CPU GHz, RAM and storage allocation and lets them create and manage virtual machines. There’s no strong emphasis on higher-level orchestration or "DevOps-friendly" features in the public documentation – it’s effectively a resource meter and VM console.

Email hosting and Hosted Exchange are administered via typical web interfaces and mail clients: Outlook Web Access, POP/IMAP, ActiveSync/MAPI and so on, with iiNet managing the underlying servers and the customer managing mailboxes and usage.

🎯 Conclusion

iiNet’s hosting and domain services are very much alive, but firmly positioned as a supporting act to its core role as a national ISP. The platform offers:

• Classic shared hosting with a Plesk-style panel for simple sites
• A limited VPS range for basic applications
• A metered Business Cloud VM platform for more flexible virtualisation
• Domain registration and DNS/mail-relay services
• Email hosting and Hosted Exchange
• Commercial SSL certificates

For existing iiNet customers – especially small and medium businesses already using iiNet for internet and voice – the key advantages are convenience and consolidation: one provider, one bill, one CRA, and a single support organization covering connectivity, domains, hosting and email.

On the downside:

• Resource allocations on shared hosting and VPS are modest by current market standards.
• Bandwidth overage on shared hosting is very expensive, so high-traffic or unpredictable sites are risky.
• There is no clearly promoted uptime guarantee or money-back window specific to hosting; customers rely on general CRA terms and are expected to manage their own backups and much of their own security.
• The platform feels conservative and lacks the richer automation, APIs and developer-oriented tooling you’d see from modern cloud providers.

In practice, iiNet’s hosting is best suited to Australian businesses that already trust iiNet for connectivity and want a basic, bundled solution for domains, small websites and email without adding another vendor to the mix. For standalone buyers looking for high-spec hosting, elastic cloud infrastructure or detailed SLAs, a specialist hosting or cloud provider will usually be a better primary choice, with iiNet continuing to play the role of network and telecom backbone.

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