Chombo noun, informal
Internet slang for a fast and reliable web hosting solution, providing premium grade Australian hosting with corporate-style reliability and prompt efficient service at budget prices.
What does Chombo mean?
We couldn't work out the best way to describe what we provide because no one does it the way we do - we provide super reliable and fast local web hosting at budget prices, so we created a word instead! Chombo isn't a brand: it's a description, it's a promise. It'll always be the cutting edge of Australian hosting solutions, and we'll always do it at the best price possible - you shouldn't pay for your host company CEO's Porsche, we'll charge you the most reasonable rate we can without sacrificing quality and service.
Also, Chombo is the Swahili word for “instrument for working” - a description that we believe fits us perfectly.
Like any web hosting company, our network is the cornerstone of our business.
Building networks for hosting companies provides a complex and unique set of challenges. The "bursty", predominantly outbound nature of its traffic, combined with peak usage scenarios are exacerbated by the high-speed downstream links of today’s consumers - who all expect and demand high-throughput connectivity.
Most hosting companies will either co-locate equipment in an IDC or lease dedicated servers directly from their upstream provider. Whilst this is beneficial when addressing startup costs in the bootstrapping phase of the business, the lack of flexibility of this scenario often proves debilitating - indeed, the reliance on a single packaged solution has been the demise of many hosting companies - some of which we know personally.
We have our own servers in a carrier-neutral facility located in Brisbane, Australia. We buy IP connectivity off Comcen/Spin Internet (AS18390). Despite the trend set by other providers to buy connectivity off cheaper "bandwidth brokers", of whose upstream integrity is questionable, we chose instead to buy our connectivity off an established national ISP. This allows us to take advantage of their extensive peering relationships, clear-channel outbound connectivity whilst being able to negotiate data rates which are as competitive as the cheaper quality "bandwidth brokers". We pass this greater bargaining power onto our customers in the form of higher bandwidth allowances.
In the interests of transparency, below is a bandwidth graph of our aggregate inbound/outbound connectivity. Feel free to ask your current host to publish the usage statistics off their edge routers too - assuming they have one.
