Website Builder now hosted on the largest most powerful cloud platform AWS

As of today, we no longer use the Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Website Builder is now hosted on the largest most powerful cloud platform AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS provides superior speeds for us to host our website builder powered websites at multiple locations around the world. 

Currently you can chose to have any domain on your website mirrored in 4 different locations around the world. NZ, Australia, Europe, USA. However, each domain can only hosted in one location. In the very near future, we will be enhancing this with our own international CDN so that your website can be accessed from the nearest location. 

The default hosting location for all our websites is now at AWS in Sydney. This location gives the best centralised speeds to all international locations, including NZ, Australia and the World. Previously speeds from our Auckland data center were not as fast to international locations as is now achieveable on the AWS backbone. We previously used the Fastly CDN to speed up our international bandwith, and it did this job well, but it also introduced some publishing and caching issues, and all site search and shopping cart purchases still had to run in the background in NZ. These complexities added support issues. 

Server hosting location does not effect search ranking (SEO) like it used to. The speed of web hosting for a given location is more important, as is the domain suffix. It is much more important to have a .nz suffix if targeting NZ, than it does to host your website in NZ. It's much more important that your website is fast to download for usability, and AWS in sydney does this job well. 

The AWS cloud is the largest in the world, however it does not provide servers here in NZ. We had to weigh up the pro's and con's of moving our software to a robust international cloud, versus attempting to build our own. NZ has it's own cloud providers, but they do not provide the same international simplicity that AWS offers. Simplicity for multiple hosting locations ensures stability, as there are less factors that could go wrong.  

We encourage all NZ, Australian and pacific customers to use our default AWS sydney web server. And all international focused websites to use our new CDN due for launch in April 2015.