Habbo partners with Macquarie Hosting as teen-networking expands in Australia

Local dedicated managed hosting solution reduces latency and improves online user experience

Sydney – 31 January 2008 – Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has signed a three year deal with teen social networking site www.habbo.com.au  to host its mission critical applications and website accessed by more than 2.9 million Australian registered users.

Under the deal, Macquarie Hosting will provide the high-availability, fully-managed hosting solution Habbo requires to increase network speeds and improve the user experience for its Australian members, most of whom are aged between 13 and 18 years.

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 Web 2.0 social networking applications.

Habbo is one of the world’s fastest growing social networking sites with an average of 75,000 new members joining each day. Since its launch in Finland in 2001, the site has expanded to offer localised networks in more than 31 countries including Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the Netherlands and the UK.

Until today, Habbo’s Australian website and critical applications for the Australian market were hosted in the US, causing latency issues and local customer discontent. By on-shoring with Macquarie Hosting, Habbo ensures one hundred per cent uptime and availability of its user content, language filters, content moderation services and user education tools. This is essential to Habbo delivering on its commitment to both entertain and secure its Australian members.

“Habbo’s customers are young, tech savvy and demanding. They expect access to information in milliseconds. Any longer and you will lose their interest and patronage. We needed a secure, highly scalable and agile platform for our critical applications that could cope with unpredictable and growing peaks in traffic,” said Jeff Brookes, Regional Director for Sulake Asia Pacific, who run and operate the Habbo service in Australia.

“Managing this back through the US, across multiple time zones just wasn’t practical. Macquarie Hosting showed us they could provide the fast, stable service we required locally and were experts in hosting digital media applications. We now have 24/7 direct access to a local team to assist us in reacting to and managing community feedback in real time.”

Spread across multiple dedicated servers, Habbo’s critical applications and website will be housed in Macquarie Hosting’s ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre in Sydney, the Intellicentre. Specialised services including load-balancing have been implemented and dedicated firewalls and managed tape back-up provide added security and redundancy.

“Macquarie Hosting has provided us with the scalable and robust dedicated server platform we need right now. Moving to a virtualised environment in future is a key priority for us though,” Brookes said.

“Macquarie Hosting’s experience as one of the select group of global hosting providers in the VMware Service Provider Program was therefore important to us. We’re confident they can move us to a virtualised environment when ready, offering the ability to quickly increase server capacity to cope with peaks in traffic without the need to invest in additional hardware.”

To meet Habbo’s tight timeline for delivery in Australia, the Macquarie Hosting solution was designed and implemented in just three weeks, half the standard implementation time. Quick delivery was essential for Habbo to ensure the solution was installed prior to the Christmas school holiday break which saw the number of unique Australian users more than double. 

“Social networking communities are booming, fuelled by faster broadband access technologies that allow content-rich sites to be downloaded and viewed quickly,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director of Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.

“The local popularity of Habbo’s teen networking community demonstrates the enormous potential for marketers, advertisers and corporations to use this innovative and cost effective medium to communicate with the teen demographic. Essential to success in this field though is investment in the necessary back-end support to ensure the service can cope with the growing number of users driven to it,” Tudehope said.