There is some exciting progress in the Australian-based cloud provider market, with Sydney-based Ninefold opening its doors to the public yesterday.
Amazon currently offer servers based in 4 different regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). While Rackspace currently offers servers in several US-based locations.
Now Australian companies have an option hosting their applications in the cloud on Ninefold’s Sydney-based infrastructure.
Ninefold’s pricing is (of course) more expensive than the US alternatives, probably due to Australia’s notoriously high bandwidth costs.
I’ve personally had experience with both Rackspace’s Cloud Servers and Amazon’s EC2. Initially I found Rackspace’s solution to be a lot simpler to use because of their web-based console. However in the last 12 months Amazon have put a lot of work into improving their AWS console, which means that non programmers can easily set up EC2 instances without having to use the command line.
Ninefold looks to have made their web-based console relatively straightforward, and they have an API solution coming soon that claims to be compatible with Amazon EC2’s API.
Although I haven’t tried Ninefold yet, I will be keeping a close eye on how things progress in the coming months.
Do you know of any other Australian based cloud providers? Have you tried out Ninefold’s offerings? Be sure to let me know in the comments!
7 replies on “Ninefold: a New Australian-Based Cloud Server & Storage Provider”
Hi James,
I just wanted to let you know that my company Cloud Central has been providing Australian based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to the Australian market from the TransACT datacentre in Canberra since December 2009.
I encourage you to get in contact for a free Cloud Central evaluation account to see for yourself. Feel free to contact me at any time with any questions you may have.
Regards,
Kristoffer Sheather
Founder & CTO
Cloud Central
Hi Kristoffer,
To be honest I haven’t actually spent much time researching the current options for Australian based cloud offerings, so its good to know that there are options such as Cloud Central.
My experience has only been with US-based cloud providers.
New companies such as Ninefold mean more competition in the market, which should ultimately make the market more affordable to Australian consumers.
James
Certainly does, things are starting to heat up and you’ll see a few announcements from us shortly regarding our new product and service plans.
Please get in contact if you’d like that evaluation account for testing.
I’ve subscribed to your blog and I’m looking forward to seeing what your announcements have to offer 🙂
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You’ll see one later today 🙂
Yes there is another Australian Cloud Provider namely Cloud People but didn’t tried Ninefold’s offerings.