Fully managed virtualised hosting solution supports improved interactive advertising capabilities

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.”