ReachLocal Partners with Macquarie Hosting to deliver greater  results to Australian Businesses

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.”