It’s not really any big secret that we’ve gradually been doing more and more work throughout North America. Nor should it really come as any surprise that we’ve been around doing this web hosting thing for quite a while now and are always looking at ways that we can improve our offerings to our valued customers.
On this basis, we’ve recently made the decision to commence a build-out of a US-based facility to offer an alternative point of presence based on the west coast of America.
What was the motivation behind this?
Over the past 2 years we’ve had the absolute privilege and pleasure of building and delivering various complex hosting environments in facilities other than our primary point of presence in Sydney, Australia. There obvious ones include Github, Stocktwits, GroupMe, Huggies, Leadformance and AffinityLive. We’ve had an awful lot of enjoyment building and successfully delivering custom solutions under our
remote management product. That said, however, there has been some challenges that we’ve come across and we are 100% confident that we can significantly improve our product offering by being in control of all aspects of service delivery.
Some of the problems we encountered whilst using other hosting providers included:
- Network outages during business hours whilst routing upgrades were being
completed,
- RAM upgrades and receiving RAM with errors,
- Receiving replacement drives with previous client data still resident on the
drives,
- receiving machines which had been built many months previously, left with default passwords and then subsequently compromised
- rapid deployment systems which actually don’t do either and;
- best of all, intermittent networking problems which couldn’t be solved by the network provider and we could only work around through changing the MAC addresses on the physical devices. Seriously? WHHAA?
For these reasons and various others, we’ve come to the conclusion:
This isn’t good enough for Anchor – We’re building in the US.
In this industry, reputation is everything and when you have high levels of dependence on suppliers then it can be difficult to be entirely in control of your own destiny.
Another factor in the decision making process was that, to my knowledge, there is no other managed hosting provider in the Australian marketplace which is providing, high-quality, premium style managed services using data centers in America. With up to 20% of Australian websites hosted in places other than locally, there seems to be a really unique opportunity to be providing premium support to our Australian customer-base whilst leveraging some of the benefits of having the servers physical located in the states — for example, much larger data bandwidth allocations and closer proximity to the American audience.
Over the new few weeks, we will be taking all our knowledge and skills that we’ve honed the past 10 years running a robust, reliable and premium hosting service. We’re then going to apply it to clean slate in a data centre facility on the other side of the globe.
Sound like a challenge? You betcha!
This is an very exciting time and upon completion we will be able offer high-volume bandwidth services with a US presence both to our existing to our Australian clients as well as extending our reach into the International market in the longer term. During this build up phase I am committed to providing a continous updates as to our detailed processes to give transparency into what goes into building up such an environment.
