Web Access knows web hosting. We are the market leader in Australia. With a team of seasoned professionals we have been around since the start. Our hosting products are priced to deliver web sites without compromise. We have been doing just that for over 11 years.

1998-1999

Web Access started as a small business in Melbourne in December 1998. A team of 4 with diverse business backgrounds came together to take on the challenge of making hosting in Australia affordable to the small business market. At that time web hosting was a costly investment:

• Australian domain names were $150-$200 per 2 years - now under $50
• web hosting that now costs under $15 per month was $50-$100 per month
• web design costs started at around $1,000 just for static pages
• SSL certificates were in excess of $500
• adding ecommerce to a web site was a high tech solution that cost thousands to implement
• shopping carts were costly to setup and maintain
• bandwidth costs in Australia were in excess of 100x the cost in the US

Web Access set out to change all that. We teamed up with like minded companies around the globe that were developing innovative products, creating new markets with better business strategies and lowering operational costs with automated services:

• We teamed up with Melbourne IT, the only Australian domain registrar at that time enabling Web Access to be the first company to offer Australian domain names under $100
• We teamed up with OpenSRS a strategic new top level domain registrar out of Canada. Their non-compete reseller model allowed us to bring top level domain name registrations to the Australian market at under $30 per year, again we were the first to do this
• For SSL certificates we partnered with Thawte, a US company, that had just become the first Certification Authority (CA) to sell public SSL certificates, we were the first company in Australia to deliver SSL certificates at under $300 for 128-bit encryption
• For our hosting control panel we chose Plesk an innovative new product developed by a small team out of Russia (Plesk is now the clear market leader in hosting control panels worldwide). Plesk allowed us to deliver a hosting solution that could be automated and largely maintained by the client for reduced support costs enabling us to offer hosting in Australia for the first time under $200 per annum

2000-2001

By late 2000 in under 2 years Web Access had acquired a 15% share of the web hosting market to become the 4th largest web host in Australia. We incorporated our business into a proprietary limited company in October 2000. With 8 full time staff we turned our attention to tackling our biggest challenge, delivering our clients web sites from Australian servers with Australian bandwidth at the same low price. This was a very ambitious undertaking, in 2001 bandwidth in Australia cost in excess of 100x that of US bandwidth. Australian data centre server leasing costs were 3-5x that of similar US products. Despite these obstacles and a monopolised Australian bandwidth market we remained committed and focused.

To achieve our goal ultimately we would require our own infrastructure, our own data centre. Start-up costs in Melbourne and Sydney would necessitate increasing our prices, so we turned our attention to Brisbane. A chance conversation with one of our biggest resellers turned out to be a young entrepreneur from Brisbane looking for financial backing to start-up a data centre. We relocated Web Access to our East Brisbane office in late 2001, a standalone multistorey facility with 800 square metres of server room floor space.

The Australian market was rapidly changing, new players such as Comindico and Uecomm were laying down their own optic fibre networks, cheaper bandwidth was on the way. With government endorsement of auDA (.au Domain Administration Ltd) in Dec 2000 control of the .au name space was finally delegated over to auDA in Sept 2001 and officially recognised in an agreement with ICANN in Oct 2001. Melbourne IT was soon to lose its monopoly on .au domain registrations, cheaper .au domain prices would follow. Web Access set out to position itself ready to take advantage of what was to come.

2002-2003

With a dedicated team of professionals the Oz Servers data centre (our sister company) took 18 months to be become fully operational and migration of the Web Access servers began. By late 2003 in under 5 years Web Access became the first Australian company ever to offer full service hosting packages for under $200 per annum on Australian servers with Australian bandwidth, in its own data centre with:

• n+1 power and UPS
• n+1 cooling
• diesel backup generator
• VESDA fire detection
• fibre optic gigabit links to Optus, AAPT and Uecomm

Web Access had set the new standard in Australian web hosting. No other hosting company even came close.

2004-2007

In 2004 we began work on implementing the next phase, a hosting server architecture that was:

• robust
• multi platform
• high performance
• high availability
• load balanced
• scalable

Taking over 2 years to develop test and deploy whilst meeting all our requirements our Expand Cluster went live in June 2007 with:

• centralised DNS servers
• windows web server cluster
• RHEL web server cluster
• MS SQL server cluster
• MySQL server cluster
• separate mail servers

Supporting services across entire Expand Cluster:

• Nagios server monitoring with automated service restart
• Nagios instant notification on failed restart to email and SMS
• full backup archives at 1/2/3/4/8/16/32 weeks
• daily incremental backups for past 7 days
• BackupPC - RHEL backup to NAS (network-attached storage)
• Microsoft VSS - windows server 2003/2008 backup to NAS

2008-2009

With our focus on launching our Expand cluster the opportunity to become an Australian domain name registrar took a back seat until late 2007 when we made our application to auDA (.au Domain Administration Ltd). In April 2008 we became a fully accredited auDA domain name registrar.

October 2009 - Windows server 2008 hosting added to the expand Cluster

2010

Australian hosting market - today
On the horizon
Oz Servers data centre
Expand Cluster - hosting server architecture