Australasian and Indian companies increase customer base

January 31, 2001 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIE) -- Hosting companies in Australia and India are reporting huge gains in their domain name and shared customer base respectively, indicating large growth in Web hosting within the Australasian and Indian economies.

According to Melbourne IT (melbourneit.com.au), a leading supplier of domain names WebCentral (webcentral.com) is Australia's number one reseller of commercial domain names within the .au registry.

WebCentral is a leading Australian provider of Internet solutions for business that includes mostly a wide range of Web hosting products that satisfy the needs of small business through to large corporations and governments.

Established in 1998, WebCentral currently has more than 30,000 account holders mostly from the small to mid-sized enterprise (SME) market. The company reports that it has registered more than 10,000 .com.au domain names with Melbourne IT since January 1997.

"WebCentral has demonstrated expertise in making administrative tasks easy, and is to be congratulated on the success of its domain name services. It has clearly demonstrated that domain names and online brand protection are essential service offerings for any hosting company and can stand alone in their own right," says Adrian Kloeden, CEO of Melbourne IT.

"It is this attitude and its advice to businesses to take a stage approach to going online that has enable WebCentral to register more .com.au domains that any other reseller in Australia."

Following the lead of explosive growth in Australian ancillary hosting services, Net4India (net4india.com), an Internet service provider in India, has also enlarged its customer base to over 8,000, but in the Web hosting arena. The company states that this makes it the largest Web hosting company in that country. The company also offers Internet access through dial-up connections, ISDN, radio and leased circuits.

"In the new Internet economy, where demand for bandwidth is accelerating and there is a need for broadband access to become increasingly pervasive, Internet service providers have to redefine their competitive edge and move up the value chain to provide better services to their customers," says Jasjit Sawhney, CEO of Net4India.

In order to achieve these goals, Net4India has invested in the establishment of 10 Internet data centers spanning across the Indian subcontinent, uniquely positioning the company to cater to huge number of clients.

These data centers offer a range of hosting capabilities - from basic Web hosting and service collocation services to "second-generation" hosting like Web application hosting and managed server facilities, which can offer greater reliability and faster deployment of e-business offerings.

According to Sawhney, Net4India's primary audience comprises of small and medium enterprises. The company offers hosting services on the Windows NT, Linux, SGI and Solaris platforms. Along with the regular Web hosting facilities, the company also offers high-end consultancy services, ranging from mirroring of sites to effective deployment of Web site across distributed services. This is expected to enable efficient delivery of content and swift transaction processing for e-commerce.

With these developments, both Australasian and Indian companies have made major strives in increasing their respective customer base and getting small to mid-sized businesses within their regions online.