Last week our engineers flicked the switch to turn on the Australian server option. It’s our third location following the United States and United Kingdom, and yes, we’re taking over the world!
For Australia we’ve deployed our solution to Google Cloud, but we will also look at AWS as an another option and possibly other local providers further down the line. We’re handling support from the US which is 24/7 so our Australian customers can always reach out if they have any questions.
We’re excited about this new step in our growth as Australia is an important market, but a challenging one too: it’s a vast country – the 6th largest on the planet yet a population of just 25 million people. Distance is a factor since international internet traffic is serviced by a handful of undersea cables, limiting routing options when things break, so it makes perfect sense to run servers locally and avoid trans-oceanic ‘hops’.
Technical challenges hasn’t stopped the digital economy from flourishing. Quite the opposite, in fact. The market is strong, growing and supported by a healthy number of digital agencies, developers and local hosting providers.
What makes Australia special is the WordPress community. If you’ve attended any of their WordCamps, you’ll know what we mean. Our theory is that the more relaxed nature of Australians helps them be more creative and code better websites.
Here are some of the success stories you may have heard about:
Advanced Custom Field (ACF), used on millions of websites, is the brainchild of Elliot Condon, who lives in the Sunshine Coast.
Envato, the company behind Themeforest and other marketplaces for digital assets (now Envato Market) are headquartered in Melbourne. They have grown into a community of over 7 million creatives have generated millions of dollars worth of business for them.
SitePoint, one of the biggest learning resources for developers, have been around since 1999. You may know of their spinoffs: 99designs and Flippa.
Metorik is another Australian-made company that you’ve probably heard about if you’re running WooCommerce. It extends the reporting function, powerful segmentation to drill deep into the data and email automation to reach those sweet-spot customers.
There are more we could mention but it is suffice to say that Australia has a strong dev and startup culture, making it an attractive market to be in, which is why we’re here — in spirit, with servers and in person too; we’ve hired someone in Melbourne to help us establish our presence down under.
We’re sponsoring the Elementor Meetup in Melbourne and plan to get more involved in the community. Reach out if you’re doing something similar and want some help.
We’re keen to talk to developers, agencies or anyone who is unhappy with their current hosting stack and keen to try something new. In particular those that are not SysAdmins but are after VPS-like performance (minus the hassles).
Want to check how quick our hosting is? Sign up for a 30 day free trial — no credit card is required and support is online to help.
Got questions? Feel free to reach out to lawrence.ladomery@convesio.com.