Datacom is our new home
For the last seven years we have been hosting Geekzone with Auckland-based ISP and hosting provider ICONZ, but since our two year contract was coming to an end it would be only good business practice to investigate alternatives in terms of cost, bandwidth, location.
And with that in mind, a few weeks ago we started talking to some colocation providers. We had very few requirements - we are not the largest online publisher in New Zealand, but Geekzone does sit regularly on the top 50 New Zealand-based websites in unique visitors, according to Nielsen.
According to our analytics data, 75% of our New Zealand visitors come from Auckland, with the majority of these using Telecom New Zealand, followed by (in order) Callplus/Slingshot, Orcon, WorldxChange, Vodafone and TelstraClear.
Since site speed is something that I consider one of the most important things for a good user experience, it made sense to us to consider Auckland-based service providers, with good Internet access and peering.
Also, when deciding location we had to consider that while New Zealand readers make up 70% of our page views, in absolute number of users it's only 40% - so we still needed to be located somewhere with good international connectivity, close to the submarine cables leaving the country.
Of course we also considered physical security access, power source, etc.
We managed to get into a great conversation with Datacom, through an introduction from Ben Gracewood. After considering services, infrastructure and prices I think we managed to agree on a deal that will allow us to continue running Geekzone with more "space" to grow, thanks to the savings we will be making.
After we have the server up and runnng, me and Nate (one of our moderators who helped me move the gear) were given a tour of the Datacom Orbit Data Centre. What an impressive building.
You will see this new box at the bottom of all our pages in the main site:
These logos represent the companies or services that help Geekzone run as fast as possible, serving more than 600,000 unique visits every month. Huge thanks to Datacom, RedJungle, Aptimize, HP ProLiant DL servers and Microsoft SQL Server. Also thanks to ICONZ, whose skilled technical people helped us grow to where we are today.
Other related posts:
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Comment by Sam Douglas, on 16-Sep-2010 08:41
How did you determine which providers to speak to?
I havent found any really good comparisons of Pacific Hosting providers, would be nice to get a comprehensive list of providers, services, pricing, cost per mb and uptime - if anyone has come across this anywhere please flick me an email :)
Cheers,
Sam
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Comment by th3r3turn, on 14-Sep-2010 23:07
"According to our analytics data, 75% of our New Zealand visitors come from Auckland" WOW thats a really interesting fact! does also count for post or just views of pages?