EIM close to web hosting deals

Emirates Internet and Multimedia (EIM) is close to finalising deals with two major international data service providers to offer its web hosting services, according to a senior official. The identities of the companies were not revealed.

From October, EIM will also start a major campaign targeted at Gulf-based organisations, which are looking within the region to host their online presence.

In mid-July, the Etisalat division decided to get into the web hosting market in a big way. It was also the first time that EIM was targeting the Gulf and other regional markets for any of its services.

"Even during summer, we had at least 100 leading local organisations interested in the services on offer from us. We conducted at least 30 site visits to our data centres during this period," said Moawyah Elwazer, marketing manager for Internet applications.

EIM operates two data centres for its hosting services, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. They act as disaster recovery centres for each other, greatly reducing the possibility of any data being lost in case of downtime at one.

These facilities were already hosting over 5,000 customers and 300,000 e-mail accounts, primarily from the UAE. "We are offering in writing up to 99.8 per cent guaranteed backbone Internet to any prospective client. This is comparable to any hosting service anywhere in the world. Our target is to have zero interruption.

"There are other hosting service providers in the Gulf, but most offer only co-location. We do that, plus shared locations."

Elwazer declined comment on EIM's tariff rates for such services, saying that revealing these details would offer competitive advantages to others.

While as a concept web hosting has been around for some time, it is only in the recent past that regional companies and organisations have looked to having their web hosting done within the region. Earlier, the obvious choices were the U.S. or Europe.

"We took our time to offer hosting on a wider scale, and learnt lessons from the competition on what they had done right and where they went wrong. Our costs are controlled, which is one reason we believe our business would be a success," said Elwazer.

"Any downturn in the regional IT sector should not have any impact on our operations."

EIM yesterday held a briefing for some of its prospective clients among the larger organisations in the UAE, which has close to one million Internet users and over 45 per cent of business on the web.