Why Adelaide Cloud?

So you run a business or operate a service and are thinking about choosing a cloud services supplier, and you’re asking yourself, “Why should I choose Adelaide Cloud?” Here are some reasons that we think are quite compelling…

You’re local, so are we.

You’re a South Australian and proud to be so. You operate your business in South Australia and think it’s a pretty good place to be. You like it when local businesses support you and you try to support local businesses too. What goes around comes around.

Support local SA business. Your customers love it.

You know how much you appreciate it when local businesses support you? Well, it’s good to be seen to be supporting a local business. It goes down very well with your customers when you can recommend a local supplier.

We’re just around the corner.

Most of the time with cloud services they are just that. Off in the cloud. They could come from anywhere. But (there’s always a “but”) just sometimes it’s good to know that there are real people behind the scenes.

Maybe you’ve had a problem and you want it resolved. Would you like help designing a system? Or, maybe, you’d just like to swing past, check us out and put some faces to names. Well, you can do all of these things because we’re just around the corner.

Need support? Come knock on our door.

When you use cloud services, support can come in many forms. Most often it’s electronic or via telephone, but there are times when it’s better to have someone come out and visit or perhaps you’d like to come to us.

Well, we’re located on the fringe of the city on Fullarton Road and are always available.

You may not be an ASX 200 company, but your business matters to us.

We’re not one of those huge companies with thousands of clients they can’t keep track of, so you don’t have to be spending tens of thousands of dollars per month with us before we bother to learn your name. The vast majority of Adelaide businesses are privately owned family companies. That’s our market. We think you are important.

Relationships matter.

Adelaide is a relationships kind of a town. We understand that, and do our best to provide the kind of business service that works in Adelaide.

Legal jurisdiction is SA.

We all hope that we’ll never need to go there, but sometimes legal action is necessary. Should that ever be the case, you’ll have the reassurance and reduced cost of using a familiar jurisdiction. We’re located in South Australia, our servers are located in South Australia, your data is located in South Australia and our contracts specify a South Australian jurisdiction.

No snooping.

Your business is not our business. We charge a reasonable fee for our services and don’t make any money from advertising. We have no interest in the contents of your data.

As they say, if you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

With Adelaide Cloud, you pay for what you need and you stay in control. You’re the customer, not the product.

Data privacy protected by South Australian and Australian Laws.

It’s become an old joke on the internet now, which by the way should say, “CIA, FBI, NSA, MI5 etc.”, but there is more than a grain of truth in it. If you don’t know where your cloud service provider locates their servers then it may also be quite true of your data.

At Adelaide Cloud, our servers are located in Adelaide and we’re regulated by Australian laws so we can protect your data from scrutiny by foreign governments.

Our Mission

Adelaide Cloud has been providing quality tailored hosting solutions to resellers, businesses and individuals since 2000. Our goal is to provide outstanding services for the best possible price. To achieve this goal we are constantly innovating and upgrading our services and monitoring our prices to remain competitive.

Our Hosting Facilities

The Data Centre that a hosting provider uses is the foundation of their hosting service. Our hosting equipment is housed locally in one of Adelaide’s premier data centres owned by a market-leading internet service provider. This gives us a great foundation for hosting reliability and service.

As a certified data centre it provides a highly fault-tolerant hosting environment which includes: two paths into the building for electricity and data; (N – Necessary) N2 +1 UPS’s and N+1 back-up generators; redundant air conditioning; multi-level security and retardant gas fire suppression.

As hosting facilities go, it’s as good as it gets and gives us great confidence in offering our service from that facility.

Our Technology

The quality of our technology sets us apart.

We have recently completed a total refresh of our physical hosting stack, giving us what we believe is the most up-to-date and capable hosting equipment in South Australia and as good as anywhere in the world.

Our own equipment stack also follows the fault tolerant (N – Necessary) N+1 principal from top to bottom.

We have Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) Internet connections (2 redundant feeds) from two different ISPs giving us in all a 2 x 2 connection set. This means that we can still continue to operate even if we either partially or completely lose our internet connection from one ISP.

These 2 x 2 internet connections are then linked to our redundant external (outside the firewall) switching equipment, with one connection from each carrier being connected into each switch. If one of the two switches fails then the other will continue to provide data to the stack.

Each external switch is connected to each of our redundant firewall/routers. The firewall/routers are set up as a High Availability cluster. If the primary unit fails, the HA unit will automatically take over. This happens within 10ms (10/1000ths of a second) and occurs with no connection loss and usually with negligible to no packet loss.

The next level of the hosting stack are our blade chassis. With no moving parts and only bus circuitry there is nothing to fail on these devices and all of the devices installed on and in it are duplicated. Each blade chassis is fitted with multiple 10/40 GbE switching modules and multiple power supply units, giving redundancy in network switching, and power supply to the blade servers and switching modules.

The blade chassis contain multiple blade servers, which are separated into multiple VMware Enterprise High Availability clusters, each optimised for different tasks such as storage, database servers, web servers and so on. Should one of the physical servers (hosts) in any of these HA clusters fail then VMware will automatically move any running Virtual Machines from the failed host to another operating physical host in the cluster. This migration is not noticeable to the end user.

The blade chassis are connected, via the redundant 10/40 GbE switching, to our SAN cluster. These SANs operate as an N+1 cluster and balance the disk load between the SANs for greater data access performance. Each SAN has fully redundant and fail-over capable hardware, allowing any element of either SAN to fail whilst maintaining effective operation of the SAN cluster.

The SANs are backed up to Backup Servers, giving us the capability to fully back up the SANs and Databases during a very short backup window. This allows for continuous operation of the web and database servers.

Once backed up to the backup servers, data is archived to tape via a carousel tape library. This 48 tape carousel can easily handle the backup volumes generated by this equipment.

Our People

Having great equipment is only the first step in providing a great hosting service. You have to be able to back it up with great people as well.

Adelaide Cloud’s 100% in-house hosting team can provide the service you need. In addition to keeping things running, we are able to help you with all manner of the technical and management issues that arise when developing and implementing web and mobile solutions. We know what it takes to be the best and the ways we can help make your site a success, which naturally ensures that your clients are happy.

When requested, we’re happy to help and provide technical resources on issues such as:

• Domain registrations
• Site setup
• Domain delegation
• Email setup
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web development
• Microsoft (ASPX, .net, SQL Server, IIS) web development
• Phone and tablet app development and database integration
• Systems administration for you and your clients if need be

Our purpose is to provide a comprehensive hosting and technical support service to help you service your customers better.

Our History

We have been providing web hosting services to our customers since 2000. Our hosting solutions range from the simplest shared cPanel right up to high availability clustered multi-server configurations.

Whether you are looking to host brochure-style sites on a shared cPanel server or your site generates hundreds of thousands of page views per hour and you need a dedicated suite of physical servers or virtual private servers, we have a hosting solution for you.

In short, we provide you with leading technology to help you grow your business and we are Adelaide based thus providing local support for our customers and supporting South Australian businesses.