If you have a website whose visitors are located in Malaysia, Singapore or any nearby country, here is one smart thing you can do today:
Move your site to a web host in/close to the country of your main audience.
Today we will be discussing how hosting locally is more beneficial over any offshore hosting and what are the best places to host your Malaysian or Singaporean website.
By locally, I mean hosting companies with a data center in the local area (Malaysia / Singapore). It doesn't have to be a Malaysian or Singaporean-owned company – what we need is the web server located close to our audience.
Malaysia and Singapore hosting market is crowded with hundreds of providers and brands – each with different options and deals.
Our aim with this post is to clear the smoke screens and focus on things users actually care about – hosting performance (locally), price, and customer service.
Are you ready? Let's roll!
Best Hosting Malaysia & Singapore (Review)
Why host your websites locally?
Verdict
First – let's have a quick overview on the web hosting companies that we tested out in this region. We considered not only the latency but also the customer support, price, and the company reputation.
| Web Host | Server Location | Speed Test (from Singapore) | Speed Rating | Price (roughly) | Order | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcatcha | W.P.Test | |||||
| Hostinger | Malaysia | 8 ms | 191 ms | A+ | S$1.00/mo | Visit |
| TMD Hosting | Singapore | 8 ms | 237 ms | A+ | S$4.05/mo | Visit |
| SiteGround | Singapore | 9 ms | 585 ms | A | S$5.36/mo | Visit |
| A2 Hosting | Singapore | 12 ms | 1795 ms | A | S$5.34/mo | Visit |
| Exabytes | Malaysia, Singapore | 19 ms | 174 ms | A | S$5.99/mo | Visit |
| Vodien | Singapore | 7 ms | 107 ms | A | S$10.00/mo | Visit |
| Shinjiru | Malaysia | 24 ms | 119 ms | D+ | S$5.00/mo | Visit |
| FastComet | Singapore | 6 ms | 622 ms | A+ | S$4.00/mo | Visit |
We use affiliate links in this article. WHSR receive referral fees from companies mentioned in this article. Our opinions are based on real experience and actual server data. Please read our review policy page to understand how our host review and rating system works.
Hostinger has one data center in Malaysia and others in the USA and UK. All of them are interconnected by 1000MBPS connection lines for increased performance and stability.
They offer Shared, Business and VPS hosting service.
Hostinger’s cheapest plan – “Single” is priced at RM2.99/mo. At the price less than a cup of Starbucks coffee, you get to host 1 website with 10 GB disk space and 100 GB bandwidth, plus innovative features like advance cron jobs, Curl SSL, MariaDB and InnoDB database, weekly backup – stuffs that you don’t usually get from a budget hosting plan.
If you don't mind paying a little extra – Hostinger Premium and Business plans offer solid hardware and freebies like free domain, free SSL, daily backup service and deluxe live support.
Bitcatcha (Singapore): 8 ms
* Click to enlarge image.
WebPageTest.org (Singapore, EC2, Chrome): 0.191s
* Click to enlarge image.
Learn more about Hostinger in Jerry's review.
Price
With over 10 years of hosting experience, TMD Hosting has gone from a single data center in Houston, Texas, to multiple operation centres located all over the U.S. and Amsterdam. They also have global hosting locations including United Kingdom, Netherlands, Singapore, Japan, and Australia.
As a performance oriented provider, you can expect to have access to features such as NGINX servers and basic caching on their Starter Plan.
My previous review of TMD Hosting scored high marks due to their extremely fast loading speed and reliable server uptimes. In addition to that, their plans are reasonably priced and they have a great customer support team.
Bitcatcha (Singapore): 8 ms
* Click to enlarge image.
WebPageTest.org (Singapore, EC2, Chrome): 0.237s
* Click to enlarge image.
Learn more in my TMD Hosting review.
Price
Besides the USA and Europe, SiteGround is offering web hosting services in Asia from their data center located in Singapore.
Their servers are customized with CentOS and have a mixed web technology of Apache and NGINX.
They offer a wide range of web hosting services including Shared, Dedicated, Cloud, and Reseller.
All SiteGround shared hosting plans come with SuperCacher – an in-house caching system for maximum website performance.
SiteGround is best known for its fast and commendable customer support. The live chat is available 24/7 to solve your problem, while they do also have phone support and email ticketing system.
Bitcatcha (Singapore): 9 ms
* Click to enlarge image.
WebPageTest.org (Singapore, EC2, Chrome): 0.585s
* Click to enlarge image.
Learn more about SiteGround in Jerry's review.
Price
A2Hosting has cutting-edge technologies concerning website speed (RAID-10 with SSD, RailGun Technology, Turbo Server).
They have one data center in Singapore and other three in Arizona (US), Michigan (US), and Amsterdam (NL).
What so special about the turbo server is that this server uses custom .htaccess, PHP API and APC which have proven to increase website speed up to 20 times.
They have come up with pre-configured server settings for popular website platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Magento etc.
Regarding their customer support, they offer the popular forms of support which includes 24/7 live chat, phone call and email ticketing.
Bitcatcha (Singapore): 12 ms
* Click to enlarge image.
WebPageTest.org (Singapore, EC2, Chrome): 1.795s
* Click to enlarge image.
Learn more about A2Hosting in Jerry's review.
Price
Exabytes is one of the oldest hosting providers in Southeast Asia with headquarter in Penang, Malaysia and external branches in Singapore and Indonesia.
The company made their establishment back in 2001.
Exabytes offer some economically crafted small business hosting plans where the highlights are free domain, free SSL, free backup service and free domain privacy protection.
Those who are looking forward to migrating away from their current web host – Exabytes offers free website transfer along with the facility to top up remaining hosting period from their previous host to the new Exabytes account (up to 12 months).
Bitcatcha (Singapore): 19 ms
* Click to enlarge image.
WebPageTest.org (Singapore, EC2, Chrome): 0.174s
* Click to enlarge image.
Learn more about Exabytes Singapore in our interview.
Price
Consider it like a flight. When a Malaysian uses a website hosted in the United States, his requests fly from Malaysia – USA – Malaysia to return a result.
If it was hosted in Malaysia, the requests would have flown inside Malaysia only, minimizing the travel time.
The exemplified travel time of the flight has a technical term – ‘latency’.
The higher the latency is, the slower your website loads.
You can minimize this travel time, so is the latency, by choosing to host on a local server.
Here is a real life example to demonstrate how server location affect latency.
Our website, WebHostingSecretRevealed.net, is hosted on a server located at the west coast of United States. Due to its peculiar server location, the website responses within 8ms in the USA (W) and 76ms in Singapore (see image #1 below).
In comparison (image #2), our test site hosted at TMD Hosting Singapore data center has a much better response speed in Singapore (8ms).
Payments in foreign currencies could be a real pain sometimes. You must have an internationally accepted payment method (with USD currency generally) for making payments.
Where local hosting companies would accept any local bank/credit card, you can see the price in your own currency and there is no currency conversion charge associated.
I bet you are definitely more comfortable talking in your first language than the second one.
All international web hosts use English for communication (assuming that English is not your first language) and you have to maintain their local office time for phone call support.
With a local company, there will be no time complexity. Some companies offer customer support in their local language. Plus, calling to a local phone number is cheaper and easier.
Bear in mind that, however, there is never a fixed solution to one’s web hosting needs. Other factors you should consider when choosing a web host include:
1- Price
Cost of web hosting is a major concern for small and medium-size websites. They cannot just go for any company for the budget constraints.
Local web hosts usually have competitive and affordable pricing to upsell. Their shared plans can start at as low as S$4.00 or RM12.00 a month.
However, the lowest, although good for your pocket, is not always the best for you. You have to give heed to your business’s size and requirements in the first place.
It is better to ask the company in advance how many visitors a package can accommodate and which is recommended for your size of business.
2- Reliability
In the case of reliability, hybrid companies (who provide both local and global hosting; i.e.: Hostinger, SiteGround, A2Hosting) are one step ahead. They have a larger workforce and more experience in handling businesses.
3- Add-on services
What so special about the local companies is that they are more generous to offer add-on services at free of cost. For setting up a website, you may need SSL certificate, website builder, domain privacy and more on the list. Therefore, it is recommended to compare hosting plans for those free added services. The more you can get, the better you can save.
Many companies also offer one free domain name, sometimes even for life. So check and you may get one.
In case you are still undecided, check out:
