What I'm Working On: A Hosting Platform Built for Australia

A few quick updates from this side: the .au domain situation, AI tools in my workflow, and a hosting platform I've been quietly building.

The .au domain reminder, again

At the risk of repeating what I wrote last year, if you haven't yet locked down the .au variation of your business domain, please do. Anybody can now register .au domains — there's no longer a priority window for the matching .com.au holder. Thirty or forty dollars a year is small insurance against someone else snapping it up.

For what it's worth: fair play to the gentleman who beat me to palmer.au and then sold it to me with a healthy markup attached.

AI tools, used carefully

AI is the hot topic right now and most of the takes are too breathless. My honest position: I'm not a fan of AI-generated content as final published material — it's increasingly visible in high-ranking articles, and once you can spot it, you can't unsee it.

Where I do find tools like ChatGPT and copy.ai genuinely useful is unsticking the writing process. Sometimes I know what I want to say but the words won't come. Generating a quick first pass gives me a slate of words and ideas to react against — I take the 10% that fits, throw out the rest, and end up with something that actually sounds like me.

For website owners writing your own content: the AI is the assistant, not the author. Use it to break a blank page, not to fill the published article.

A hosting platform I've been building

The bigger news: I've been quietly building a managed Australian hosting platform over the past six months.

Some background — I sold my previous web hosting business in 2016 with a non-compete clause that expired last year. Now I can build again.

The pitch, in short: a managed hosting platform similar to my "go to" of recent years (Kinsta) but built for the AU/NZ market without the USD pricing premium. The approach has been to cherry-pick the features I've valued most across the platforms I've used over the years, then assemble them in one place.

It's getting close. New features have been shipping almost weekly since October, but I need the client portal at a higher standard before opening it to a wider audience. Thanks again to the early adopters quietly testing things — you know who you are.

Watch this space. I'll have more to share soon.

What about that other free option?

Quick aside for the technically inclined: GitHub Pages is still a genuinely good free option for basic static websites — covered in my earlier piece. Not for everyone, but if you've got a simple site that doesn't need regular updates, worth knowing about.

Get in touch if any of this is relevant to your business — happy to chat about domains, content workflow, or being one of the next hosting beta invitations.