Features and Ease of Use
Media Fortress includes a 99.99% uptime SLA on all of their shared hosting plans. Every plan also comes with cPanel support. Media Fortress positions themselves as a one-stop shop for Australian-owned businesses, offering a full suite of internet marketing services not at all limited to simply web hosting. They also seem more focused on catering to beginners or those without as much technical knowledge: their packages, while descriptive enough, don’t provide many details on the more technical aspects of their hosting services.
Here’s the full list of features included with their packages:
- Pre-installed applications including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal
- Daily backups
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- Unlimited subdomains
- SSH access
- Online file manager
- Security firewall
- Spam protection
However, SSL certificates must be purchased separately and there is no mention of the PHP and MySQL versions available. Furthermore, their packages seem limited to Linux, so those looking for Windows-based hosting may have to look elsewhere.
Pricing and Support
Media Fortress offers three different pricing plans that offer decent price-to-value increases with each tier. In addition, the price you’ll pay for Australia-based servers is in line with the market average. Overall, their packages offer decent value for money. There are slight discounts available on the monthly rates, provided you’re willing to lock yourself into a one-year or two-year contract. Media Fortress also offers a 30-day money back guarantee.
The entry-level Basic plan offers 1GB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth, which is enough for beginner webmasters but may prove restrictive as you expand. Upgrading to the mid-tier Business plan doubles the price but gives you thrice the storage and twice the data, making it a good — but not great — value to webmasters that want a little more performance.
However, one area where it falls short is in the absolute bandwidth and memory provided. The highest-tier Professional plan only offers 10GB of storage, which is insufficient for large and even most medium-sized websites.
Support options are all in Australian English and the quality of service is average. There’s a live chat option during normal Australian business hours that will put you in touch with a representative, but when I tried it, they were only able to answer some of my most basic questions. More advanced support is available via email, but this may take a few days. There’s also a phone number to call, but I found this to be mostly sales-focused and was always referred back to email support. There’s no self-help knowledge base, sadly.
