Ninemsn splits IT between Amazon, Hostworks

Hostworks has won an extension for the managed hosting of Ninemsn's legacy IT systems, in parallel with the publisher’s recent move towards use of public cloud services.

Hostworks has provided a fully managed hosting service to Ninemsn and all its internet-facing IT systems for the last 14 years, which included ad-serving systems, websites and development websites.

In December 2012,Hostworks lost around half of that contract to US public cloud giant Amazon, as part of a Ninemsn plan to move to a new internally-developed publishing system for simple sites alongside a Sitecore-powered multi-cloud content management system hosted in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Ninemsn has over 200 instances across Azure and other providers.

The decision to move to Amazon was based predominantly around cost and level of expertise, iTnews understands.

Ninemsn has been progressively migrating its IT environment from a series of older publishing systems, developed in the '90s at the company’s inception to the new internally-developed system. The publisher viewed the public cloud as an opportunity to bring the management of its systems back in-house.

Ninemsn today told iTnews Hostworks would continue to manage the older publishing systems, for which Ninemsn has no immediate plans to migrate, for the length of its extended 36 month contract.

Ninemsn is the publisher of such brands The Australian Women’s Weekly, Wide World of Sports and A Current Affair.