Canadian Real Estate Association

Primus Telecommunications Canada Inc., today announced an extended three year contract with The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) to host and provide managed services for mls.ca, one of the busiest websites in Canada with more than four million unique visitors every month. Agents and customers visiting the mls.ca website will continue to experience fast response rates and near 100 per cent up time.

As part of the agreement mls.ca users will continue to benefit from increased reliability through a more robust, industry leading infrastructure. Primus will host the mls.ca site across two of its Internet Data Centres.

"Our clients look to us to help with their core business," said A.J. Byers, senior vice president of Primus Business Services. "Primus looks forward to continuing to support The Canadian Real Estate Association to enhance the user experience for visitors to the mls.ca website."

CREA will draw upon Primus' managed services which include its Internet Data Centres, 24/7 technical support teams, and extensive server and network management expertise. With managed network management, Primus undertakes mls.ca's server load balancing, server and network monitoring, and managed firewall and VPN services, so CREA can focus its resources on serving the needs of agents and customers.

"The renewed contract makes it possible for us to concentrate on providing accurate and comprehensive information to our members." said Dan Gies, MLS(R: 69.98, +0.93, +1.34%) & Technology Chair from the CREA. "Given the complexities of our website infrastructure, and our requirement for the site to be available near 100 percent of the time, I've been very happy with the reliability of Primus' Internet Data Centres, the managed service team, and its flexible contracts that satisfy our growth."

By leveraging multiple Primus' Data Centres, Primus can ensure back up of all critical data for redundancy in case of natural disasters. Managed network services ensure seamless user visibility for Canada's largest industry trade association which represents more than 94,000 real estate brokers, agents and salespeople who work through more than 100 real estate boards and associations. Since February 2008, the mls.ca and sia.ca French websites had more than four million unique visitors each month, resulting in over 12 million visits to the mls.ca and sia.ca websites each month when repeat visits are included.