Australia Web Hosting
Sunday, March 16th, 2008We had a place in Melbourne, initially thinking of offering web hosting services in Australia. When I had the quotes, it really scared the hell out of me. Hosting in Singapore is expensive enough, hosting in Australia is quote prohibitive.
Most datacentres are not selling per mbps but rather 30 GB, 300 GB etc, this will be extremely difficult for a web hosting company. Imagine a DOS or a spam attack, that alone can take up your entire bandwidth allocation for the month.
Hiring staff in Australia also isn’t cheap, there is ample social security, you will need to hire at above those social security rates coupled with the rising AUD compared to SGD makes it more expensive.
Still proceeding more as a representative office in Australia rather than putting in full fledged facilities in Australia unless I can get good and reliable datacentre partner to share the burden.
It is quite a pity as I do sense a market but the overheads are far too high at the moment. Hopefully as the Internet there develops, the costs will go down enough to make hosting a viable business.
Not really giving up though, I feel that there is still potential, but may need to offer value added services like a complete web design, hosting and programming packages. Need to form alliances with Australia based designers and programmers for that. It would be easier for them to communicate rather than to outsource such programming and designing to third world countries.