Macquarie Hosting Does 3 Year Deal With HABBO

Macquarie Hosting has signed a three year deal with teen social networking site www.habbo.com.au to host its mission critical applications and Web site 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 experience with one hundred per cent Web-facing companies, and low latency availability of Web 2.0 social networking applications. Jeff Brookes, the regional director of Sulake which runs the Habbo service in Australia, said its customers are young, tech savvy and demanding. "They expect access to information in milliseconds. Any longer and you will lose their interest and patronage," he said. "We needed a platform that could cope with unpredictable and growing peaks in traffic. "Managing this back through the US, across multiple time zones just wasn't practical." Spread across multiple dedicated servers, Habbo's critical applications and Web site will be housed in Macquarie Hosting's ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre in Sydney, the Intellicentre.