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.
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