truelocal.com.au partners with Macquarie Hosting to support growth explosion

New hosting solution provides high redundancy and scalability

Sydney – 16 October 2007 – Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has signed a three year deal with truelocal.com.au to host its online local search directory of over 1.3 million Australian businesses.

Macquarie Hosting will provide virtualised infrastructure and managed services required for truelocal.com.au to build on its recent explosive growth in the Australian market and will also help manage the unpredictable peaks in traffic driven to its online service.

truelocal.com.au is part of News Digital Media and is one of Australia’s fastest growing online business directories. Since its launch in February 2006, the service has increased unique browsers by 290 per cent.

Under the deal, Macquarie Hosting will provide truelocal.com.au with a high-availability fully-managed hosting solution employing a sophisticated virtual server infrastructure running the VMware ESX environment, spread across multiple high-performance virtual hosts. The servers will be housed in Macquarie Hosting’s ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre in Sydney, the Intellicentre.

Following a competitive assessment of hosting providers, Macquarie Hosting was selected for its proven experience with one hundred per cent web-facing companies as well as its ability to provide 24/7, low latency availability of mission critical applications.

“Our commitment to deliver within the Australian local search category extends to the critical infrastructure supporting our service. We need to be confident that when millions of Australian consumers access our directory we can provide the fast, smooth and reliable experience they expect - one that will drive them back to us time and time again.” stated truelocal CEO, Gary Cox.

As part of a select group of global hosting providers in the VMware Service Provider Program, Macquarie Hosting can provide the robust and scalable platform truelocal.com.au needs to quickly increase server capacity to cope with peaks in traffic without the need to invest in additional hardware.

Designed with no single point of failure, the dedicated network infrastructure is also fully redundant and includes SSL offloading to reduce server overheads and maximise performance.  All servers are connected to Macquarie Hosting’s managed storage area network (SAN) and include tape back-up systems for added redundancy and future scalability on demand.

In case of a hardware failure on one of the three hosts, Macquarie Hosting’s VMotion solution also enables a re-build of the truelocal.com.au network on other hosts in very short time frames. This provides the confidence truelocal.com.au needs to deliver on its commitment to connect Australian consumers with Australian businesses anytime, anywhere.

“The Internet search market is exploding in Australia, currently estimated at $350 million, with organisations in this space looking for new ways to refine, develop and extend their offerings to customers so as to differentiate and compete,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

"Macquarie Hosting's managed server virtualistion offering is perfect for one hundred per cent web-based companies, offering the same level of proactive management, security and performance they expect from traditional hosted server environments but with the additional benefits of superior levels of agility, scalability, and business continuity.”

“Macquarie Hosting is a leader in enterprise server virtualisation and has proven experience hosting mission critical applications for one hundred percent web-based companies,” Cox said “Working with the likes of Webjet, Showbiz.com.au and Loop

Mobile, we felt confident Macquarie Hosting had the experience required to deliver the network availability and high levels of redundancy we require as well as an understanding of the nature of our business and customer demands for a smooth and reliable experience.”