Mar, 2015 : How Cloud Has Changed Australian Web Hosting Landscape

📅 March 2, 2015 - Over the last few years, Australian industries have been rushing towards the adoption of cloud computing solutions to improve IT infrastructure and re-invent critical business processes. Last year, a research by IDC found that 86% of Australian enterprises are using the cloud, which was a significant increase compared to the year before.

Unsurprisingly, the adoption rates keep rising as the cloud technology becomes a more dominant resource in the global tech industry. Namely, as revealed in the Gartner survey earlier this year, IT leaders in Asia-Pacific region are still among the top investors in the cloud technology, with around 31% of CEOs saying that a significant portion of their budget goes into the cloud. By comparison, global cloud investments range up to 25%, which clearly shows Australia's dedication to the emerging technologies.

Certainly, such a trend has a lot to do with the increased focus of major cloud providers such as Rackspace and Amazon on this particular market. The fact that the two companies launched their massive data centers almost at the same time substantially changed the situation on the market.

Amazon and Rackspace in Australia

Amazon was the first of the cloud pack to bring their servers to Australia and try to conquer the largest portion of the market in the region. Arriving almost a year after, Rackspace was by no means late to the arena.

What happened in the Australia's web hosting market afterwards was a shift towards affordable hosting solutions and ongoing price wars between the two. Of course, most Australian businesses did profit from such a competition, most notably in terms of quality of the services offered to the market. While Rackspace was the first to introduce managed cloud hosting, Amazon kept beating the competitors with the lower prices.

Furthermore, as reported by CRN, Rackspace launched two new managed cloud service tiers named “managed infrastructure” and “managed operations” to further distinguish from their main competitor. Obviously, Australian businesses had quite a few benefits from an ongoing competition between the two.

How local web hosting providers fair

While most end-users saw some major improvements in the ways web services are delivered, for smaller Australian web hosting companies the arrival of the clouds meant yet another challenge. Although the demand for hosting services keeps growing, local providers find it painfully difficult to differentiate themselves in such a crowded market.

Thus, it's unsurprising that most of the web hosting providers in Australia started tailoring some new offers specific to the market's needs. We may see this in the example of the companies such as Crucial Hosting, which offers attractive reseller programs for Sidney-based companies. The customized offering is designed to suit the needs of the local market, which can profit from geolocated servers and advanced features reseller hosting brings.

The next steps for Australia

Looking over the last few years, it could be said that both end-users and web hosting companies worldwide have benefited a lot from the emergence of cloud solutions. This is certainly true in case of Australia, where we see them taking the cloud quite seriously. As opposed to most other world's regions that did have their hesitations when it comes to moving workloads and applications to the cloud, Australia embraced the potential quite eagerly.

This attitude may well bring boost to the region's economy and an overall satisfaction among the client companies striving towards tech innovation. As for the local web hosts, they still can find multiple ways to progress if they recognize the current needs in the market as is the case with the one mentioned above.