Dedicated Managed Hosting Solution supports explosive growth
Sydney – 5 December 2007 – Macquarie Hosting,
a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has signed a
three year deal with Australian search engine advertising provider
ReachLocal.
Under the deal Macquarie Hosting will host ReachLocal’s Australian
website and thousands of small business proxy sites. All sites and
mission critical applications will be housed on Macquarie Hosting
servers in its ISO and DSD
certified data centre in Sydney, the Intellicentre.
Macquarie Hosting will provide the
dedicated managed hosting
services required to support rapid growth of ReachLocal’s Australian
business. In just five months ReachLocal has attracted more than
250 customers and forecasts continued strong growth in the next
12 months.
ReachLocal enables small businesses to target more than six million
prospective Australian consumers searching for services and products
online every day. The ReachLocal proxy sites are replicas of its
customers’ websites. They act as gateways to the customers’ actual
websites, allowing ReachLocal and its customers to track phone calls
and other communications that are received as a result of their
online advertising campaign.
Following a competitive assessment of local and international
hosting providers, ReachLocal selected Macquarie Hosting for its
proven experience with 100 per cent Web-facing companies. Guaranteed
24/7, low latency availability of mission critical applications
and provision of a dedicated team of technical experts to support
growth in Australia were also critical factors.
“As an emerging company in the booming online advertising market,
entering into a managed hosting relationship with an organisation
that understood the nature of our business and the demands of our
customers was crucial for us,’’ said Steve Power, CEO of ReachLocal.
“Working with Macquarie Hosting not only eliminated the need
to invest in hardware and infrastructure at the time of launch,
it also gives us peace of mind that we can quickly scale our infrastructure
to support future business growth, while maintaining superior service
levels for our customers.”
The high-availability, fully-managed hosting solution is built
on multiple dedicated servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
and is optimised for rapid scalability and increased bandwidth.
Specialist SSL load-balancing allows Macquarie Hosting to manage
peaks in traffic to the sites and dedicated firewalls provide added
security and redundancy.
To meet ReachLocal’s tight timeline for launch in Australia,
the Macquarie Hosting solution was designed and implemented in just
three weeks, half the standard implementation time. Following implementation,
ReachLocal has maintained access to its dedicated team of Macquarie
Hosting technical engineers as well as controlled access to the
Macquarie Hosting servers, ensuring regular software updates are
managed quickly and easily.
“By on-shoring and hosting its servers locally, ReachLocal reduces
latency and ensures greater control of the content of its solution,”
said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting for Macquarie Telecom.
“Managing regular updates back through the US, across two different
time zones is just not practical. The Macquarie Hosting dedicated
support team ensures ReachLocal can deal with its team in real time
– they act as an extension of the business. This makes far more
business sense and enables ReachLocal to deliver relevant and timely
updates for local customers.”
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