A division of Macquarie Telecom, Macquarie Hosting, announced today it has signed a three-year hosting deal with leading Australian automotive website, http://www.carsguide.com.au.

To host carsguide.com.au's recently upgraded website and mission critical applications, Macquarie Hosting will provide, under the deal, a high-availability, data centre solution comprised of both dedicated and enterprise virtual servers at their data centre.

For its proven experience with digital media companies as well as its specialization in the design and implementation of complex managed-virtualised hosting environments, the Macquarie Hosting data centre was chosen by carsguide.com.au. carsguide.com.au's, previously, website and mission-critical applications were hosted partly in-house and partly with an external third-party on dedicated servers.

More than 80,000 classified listings are carried by Carsguide.com.au. To improve search functionality for customers and deliver more targeted opportunities for marketers, new data indexing software was implemented in March. carsguide.com.au needed to improve the scalability of its site to cope with increases in search volume and time on site to support these upgrades.

carsguide.com.au's mission-critical applications and content, spread across multiple virtual hosts, will be housed in Macquarie Hosting's ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre, the Intellicentre. The data centre provides a high-availability network infrastructure with redundant firewalls, load balancing, switches and Internet ports provide low latency and security. High-speed tape backup and SAN storage services provide added redundancy.