01 Where exactly does my site's data live?
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When you sign up, your hosting account is provisioned to one of our two data centre presences — NextDC B1 in Brisbane or Equinix Sydney, depending on plan tier and current allocation. We can tell you which on request. Both are Tier III certified, both are in Australian jurisdiction, both have full ISO/SOC/PCI controls in place.
02 Why two cities instead of one bigger setup?
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Geographic diversity is the foundation of resilience. A single data centre — no matter how good — is still a single point of failure at the regional level. Power grid issues, fibre cuts, natural events, civil emergencies all happen at the metropolitan scale. Splitting between Sydney and Brisbane means we're never all-in on one city's infrastructure.
03 Do you own the buildings?
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No — and we're upfront about that. We own and operate our servers, but we colocate them inside NextDC and Equinix facilities. These are some of Australia's most respected DC operators with certifications and physical security standards far beyond what any individual hosting company could build alone. Colocation is the right model: best-of-breed infrastructure underneath, our hands on the servers above.
04 What does 'Tier III certified' actually mean?
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Tier III is the Uptime Institute's classification for data centres with N+1 redundancy on all critical systems (power, cooling, network), concurrently maintainable infrastructure (can do maintenance without downtime), and a target of no more than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. It's the standard for serious commercial infrastructure — above 'basic' colocation, below 'fault tolerant' Tier IV which is overkill for almost all web hosting.
05 What about peering? Will my visitors get good latency?
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Both facilities sit at the heart of Australia's peering ecosystem. Equinix Sydney hosts the Equinix Internet Exchange Sydney with 100+ networks peering directly. NextDC B1 connects to IX Australia QLD-IX and is the only Queensland facility with native Google Cloud access. For Australian visitors, traffic stays local — no trans-Pacific hairpins. For international, both facilities have direct submarine cable head access.
06 Do you publish an uptime SLA?
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Not as a specific percentage. The moment a host advertises '99.99% uptime', they're usually either lying or about to pay out — and the fine print typically excludes everything that actually causes downtime. What we can tell you honestly: our DC partners both publish their own 100% facility uptime guarantees, our infrastructure is monitored 24/7, and we post real status updates on the support page when something is degraded.
07 Is my data subject to overseas jurisdiction?
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No. ARKNET PTY LTD is an Australian company with Australian operations. Both data centres are physically in Australia. Your data — and our access to it — falls under Australian privacy law. We're not a subsidiary of a US or European cloud, and we're not subject to the US CLOUD Act, the Patriot Act, or equivalent foreign jurisdiction reaches.
08 What about IPv6?
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Yes — we provide IPv6 alongside IPv4 on all hosting accounts. Both data centres have IPv6 connectivity through their upstream carriers, and we operate dual-stack on the server layer.
09 How do you handle planned maintenance?
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We schedule maintenance windows outside AEST business hours (typically 2am–5am AEST) and email affected customers at least 48 hours ahead. Because both facilities are concurrently maintainable (the 'Tier III' part), most platform-layer maintenance happens without any customer impact at all.
10 What if a whole data centre goes down?
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Honest answer: a complete failure of a Tier III certified facility is extremely rare — these places have N+1 power, N+1 cooling, redundant network, generator backup. But if it happens, our DNS is hosted independently (redundant nameservers) and we can fail traffic to the other DC for accounts that need it. For most customers, an outage at one facility doesn't affect the other.