carsguide.com.au partners with Macquarie Hosting as consumers continue to drive advertising dollar online
June 2008 - Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has
signed a three year hosting deal with automotive website, carsguide.com.au.
Under the deal Macquarie Hosting will provide a high-availability, managed
hosting solution comprised of both dedicated and enterprise virtual servers to
host carsguide.com.au’s recently upgraded website and mission critical
applications.
Macquarie Hosting was selected, following a competitive assessment of hosting
providers, for its proven experience with digital media companies as well as its
specialisation in the design and implementation of complex managed-virtualised
hosting environments.
The solution will support carsguide.com.au’s plans for technical consolidation
and product expansion in the Australian market, enabling the company to meet
increased demand from its advertisers for more diverse and creative online
marketing opportunities.
Macquarie Hosting turbo-charges search with enterprise server virtualisation
Carsguide.com.au currently carries more than 80,000 classified listings. In
March this year it implemented new data-indexing software to improve search
functionality for customers and deliver more targeted opportunities for
marketers. The software tracks visitor shopping behaviour, including keyword
search details, and automatically delivers relevant promotional material to
match.
In line with these upgrades carsguide.com.au needed to improve the scalability
of its site to cope with anticipated increases in both search volume and time on
site, as well as ensure 24/7 availability of its mission-critical content
management platform and data-indexing software.
Previously, carsguide.com.au’s website and mission-critical applications were
hosted partly in-house and partly with an external third-party on dedicated
servers.
“There is increasing pressure for digital media companies to deliver more
relevant and innovative opportunities for marketers to communicate with their
audiences. At the same time, we need to ensure a feature rich and highly
responsive user experience with rapid scalability to cope with increased
traffic.” said Marcus Verrall, Head of Technology, carsguide.com.au, News
Digital Media.
“Macquarie Hosting quickly understood our specific business needs and provided
scalable solutions with a rapid provisioning cycle. The team’s deep
understanding of the challenges associated with enterprise virtualised servers
was a key factor in our decision to partner with Macquarie Hosting. The clear
engagement and provisioning process gave us confidence that they can meet our
infrastructure needs both now and in the future.”
Spread across multiple virtual hosts, carsguide.com.au’s mission-critical
applications and content will be housed in Macquarie Hosting’s ISO and DSD
Gateway certified data centre, the Intellicentre. High-availability network
infrastructure with redundant firewalls, load balancing, switches and Internet
ports provide low latency and security. High-speed tape backup and SAN storage
services provide added redundancy.
Macquarie Hosting hits to accelerator on dedicated virtual server implementation
The carsguide.com.au virtualised environment was designed and implemented in
less than six weeks, half the standard implementation time for virtualised
environments. Fast delivery was essential for carsguide.com.au to ensure it had
the support and scalable infrastructure in place to manage increased traffic to
the site following the launch of its improved search functionality.
“We are in the midst of a significant boom in the digital media industry as
marketers, advertisers and corporations turn to key players in this space to
provide an innovative and cost-effective medium to communicate with their
audiences,” said Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom.
“These customers need specialised dedicated managed hosting and virtualisation
solutions delivered by business partners that understand and can meet the 24/7
demands that the Web dictates.”
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