OzHosting.com goes virtual for re-launch

Hosting provider OzHosting.com has re-launched itself to focus on the consumer and SME markets, but not before it rebuilt its infrastructure around virtualization.

Once a big name hosting, OzHosting.com was acquired by Destra and then BlueFreeway, but since it continued to get customer enquiries over the phone and Internet, its founder and managing director Anthony Banek decided to give it a new lease on life.

“We needed to re-invent shared hosting and spent six to 12 months working on our hosting platform to support auto-provisioning,” Banek, said.

OzHosting.com used VMware to develop its virtual infrastructure used to deliver shared hosting, but its virtual private server (VPS) service will be delivered with Virtuozzo on separate dedicated infrastructure.

With the new infrastructure in place, OzHosting.com will take over some 12,000 shared accounts from sister company BlueCentral which will focus on the enterprise market.

Director of products and services James Leitch said the decision to go with a greenfield, virtual infrastructure was made when the existing architecture was deemed not as rapidly scalable as required.

“We also want to adopt virtualization across our own business so it made sense,” Leitch said. “Our engineers are VMware certified and we are looking at Microsoft's Hyper-V so we can use that as well.”

Leitch said there is not much interest from customers for Xen-based virtual hosting.

Rack-mounted servers were chosen for the new hardware infrastructure with blade servers ruled out due to concerns around data portability and an increase in power and cooling costs.

“In the UK some datacentre providers have put up prices for blade space due to hot-spots they create,” Leitch said.

OzHosting.com offers Windows and Linux (Centos) shared and VPS hosting, but is moving more into SaaS with hosted business applications like Exchange, SharePoint and Microsoft CRM.

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