Dedicated Hosting Firm, Macquarie, Supports Car Guide Website

Sydney, Australia - (The Hosting News) - June 17, 2008 - Macquarie Telecom's subsidiary, web hosting provider, Macquarie Hosting, has entered into a three-year agreement to provide hosting services, for an Australian automotive website.

The terms of the deal provide a high-availability, data center solution comprised of both dedicated and enterprise virtual servers at their data centre to host carsguide.com.au's recently upgraded website and mission critical applications.

Marcus Verrall, Head of Technology, carsguide.com.au, News Digital Media noted, ''There is increasing pressure for digital media companies to deliver more relevant and innovative opportunities for marketers to communicate with their audiences. We also need to ensure a feature rich and highly responsive user experience with rapid scalability to cope with increased traffic.''

The Macquarie Hosting data centre was chosen by carsguide.com.au for its proven experience with digital media companies as well as its specialization in the design and implementation of complex managed-virtualised hosting environments. 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.

Carsguide.com.au carries more than 80,000 classified listings. New data indexing software was implemented in March to improve search functionality for customers and deliver more targeted opportunities for marketers. To support these upgrades carsguide.com.au needed to improve the scalability of its site to cope with increases in search volume and time on site.

Mr. Verrall added, ''Macquarie Hosting quickly understood our specific business needs and provided scalable data centre solutions with a rapid provisioning cycle. The data centre 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. The data centre provides a 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.

The carsguide.com.au virtualised environment in the Macquarie Hosting data centre was designed and implemented in less than six weeks, half the standard implementation time for virtualised environments. Fast delivery was essential to ensure the support and scalable infrastructure in the data centre was in place to manage increased traffic to carsguide.com.au following the launch of its improved search functionality.

Aidan Tudehope, Managing Director, Hosting, Macquarie Telecom remarked, ''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. These customers need specialised dedicated managed hosting and virtualisation data centre solutions delivered by business partners that understand and can meet the 24/7 demands that the web dictates.''

carsguide.com.au is News Digital Media's national digital automotive brand featuring comprehensive news and reviews from Australia's leading motoring experts. Additionally, carsguide.com.au provides road tests, motoring tools and a marketplace for online classifieds. The site carries more than 76,000 listings. carsguide.com.au is also available on mobile phone with carsguide.mobi.

Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, provides Dedicated Hosting for Australian businesses. Its services include highly skilled professionals, with increased flexibility, accessible secure scalable infrastructure and guaranteed service levels for mission critical online applications with a dedicated hosting solution. Online applications with guaranteed uptime, reliability and scalability, as well as security management, is offered for server environment and infrastructure. Managed dedicated hosting solutions are provided with an IT infrastructure including a fully in-sourced accredited managed data centre.

Its dedicated managed hosting and secure data centre facility, the Intellicentre, is certified to the highest local and international security standards including ISO 27001 and DSD Gateway. This helps organisations confidently address security concerns associated with corporate governance, privacy regulations and audit requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Macquarie Hosting also provides SAN/NAS storage management, accredited security and comprehensive monitoring and management for organizations including Fairfax Business Media, Haymarket Media, Showbiz.com.au and WebJet.

To learn more, please visit: www.macquarietelecom.com.

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