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MINNEAPOLIS, MN - December 19, 2003
Items of interest.....
I. CEO's Corner -- A Holiday Greeting
II. Digital North Expands Into Agiliti Datacenter
III. Digital North Technology Update
IV. Gypsy Rogers: New System Administrator
V. Load Balancing -- Taking Your Website to the Next Level
VI. Rockler.com
I. CEO’S CORNER
I wish you and your family a Happy Holidays and New Year!
The Winter is usually a time for quiet reflection in Minnesota. During this
time of year it seems as though the everyday sounds around us are dampened by the freshly fallen
snow. Nature hibernates as we enjoy times of holiday cheer.
We are definitely not hibernating at Digital North. We are in full swing while
many of our retail customers are enjoying a successful peak season. We have invested additional
time to ensure that customers enjoy fast and reliable hosting services during this important
season.
I am excited about our new relationship with Agiliti. When we started Digital
North we decided to partner with the best datacenters in the Twin Cities. Digital North will
expand into Agiliti's datacenter and continue to provide an unequaled level of service to
businesses nationwide.
We are focusing more on advertising and marketing in the Year 2004. We are now
advertising weekly in The Business Journal. You should see and hear more about Digital North in
the regional press. We are also adding more technical and sales staff to meet our customers'
growing needs.
If you have any ideas or suggestions on how to improve our service I would
appreciate you giving me a call or sending me an email.
Enjoy the holidays!!
Mike Sowada
CEO
Digital North
msowada@digitalnorth.net
952-924-2450
II. Digital North Expands Into Agiliti Datacenter
Digital North is pleased to announce that we have signed a service agreement
with Agiliti as an infrastructure partner. Based in St. Paul, Agiliti operates one of the best
datacenters in the Twin Cities. Digital North will complement Agiliti's service offering by
delivering price-competitive managed services.
Digital North now provides managed hosting services from three of the finest
datacenters in the Twin Cities area. Clients can leverage our infrastructure to improve the
performance of their services, increase reliability, and provide disaster recovery. We expect
our hosting network at Agiliti to be fully operational in January 2004.
III. Digital North Technology Update
Digital North customers will find plenty of new presents under the tree this
year. Our technical team whipped up a delightful assortment of new services for customers.
Digital North is upgrading all hosting customers to the newest version of
Urchin over the next month. Urchin 5.5 provides slick website visitor reporting and analysis.
The new version of Urchin adds almost a dozen new reports and vastly improved graphics. Customers
can export reports directly into Microsoft Word or Excel documents. Urchin 5.5 represents a
significant upgrade in website reporting. The service upgrade is absolutely free.
We recently installed new shared Linux webservers featuring CPanel. CPanel is
a web tool that application developers can use to effectively manage their websites. Cpanel
provides enhanced control of CGI applications, MySQL databases, PostgreSQL databases, and the
file system. Once you use CPanel you will wonder how you ever lived without it. CPanel is a
free upgrade to all of our shared linux hosting customers.
Last quarter we announced free Email Spam Protection for all of our email
customers. We have received dozens of email messages thanking us for adding this feature.
Digital North is now providing free Email Virus protection to our email customers. We still
recommend that customers install virus protection on their computer systems. Our email virus
protection solution provides an additional layer of protection on top of your existing systems.
A couple of our retail customers approached us at the beginning of the holiday
season with a technical challenge -- they had too many website visitors and not enough horsepower
to handle their requests. They needed a way to increase the performance and stability of their
website without requiring significant investment. No problem! We teamed up with Coyote Point
to deliver a cost-effective load balancing solution for the retailers. What is load balancing?
Check out the article below. We liked the Coyote Point system so much that we decided to become
an authorized reseller.
Red Hat recently announced the End-of-Life for many of their Linux
distributions. After January 1, 2004 Red Hat will no longer provide support for Red Hat Linux
7.x or Red Hat Linux 8 products. After May 1, 2004 Red Hat will no longer support Red Hat
Linux 9. We use Red Hat Linux on a few of our core management servers. We plan to upgrade
these servers to Red Hat Linux Enterprise during the next quarter. A handful of our customers
are affected by the Red Hat announcement. We will work with each customer to determine an
appropriate transition plan. If you are using Red Hat Linux in your corporate environment you
should begin creating a transition plan today.
IV. Gypsy Rogers: New System Administrator
Gypsy Rogers has recently joined Digital North as a senior systems
administrator. Gypsy has over 10 years of IT experience working with ISP's and hosting providers
all over the country. He was instrumental in building the technical infrastructure for several
national Internet providers. Recently he managed an Internet consulting firm working with small
businesses. Gypsy assures us that there are only two other people in the country that bear his
unique name. He is planning to get married in January 2004.
V. Load Balancing -- Taking Your Website to the Next Level
by Jason Baker, Director of Operations
It's 1pm on a weekday afternoon and you just sent out email messages to 100,000
customers announcing a new holiday special. Fifteen minutes later your website, which was
previously performing flawlessly, grinds to a halt. Your website visitors cannot view products
or initiate orders. You lose hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in sales.
I call this the "Oprah effect". I had a customer a couple years ago that was
selling bath and kitchen products. They called me up one day and told me that their website
would be mentioned on the Oprah Winfrey TV show that very afternoon. They wanted to know if
their web server would be able to handle the additional web traffic. While the web server was
a very fast system it had never been tested under high stress.
I watched the clock count down the seconds before the start of Oprah's national
broadcast. I was not watching her program but I could tell when she mentioned the website on her
show. Visitors started to flood the website with requests. The website normally handled hundreds
of simultaneous requests and now it was dealing with thousands. The web server failed under
the huge load.
On of the most common questions I am asked by new dedicated webserver customers
is: Will my server be able to handle all of my website visitors? Typically the answer is a
resounding yes. Digital North uses high-performance servers designed by manufacturers like Dell,
HP (Compaq), and IBM. We use fast CPUs, plenty of memory, and speedy hard drives. The server
will handle website visitors under normal or even higher levels of traffic. But the server will
fail when faced with extraordinary numbers of visitors. The server fails at the worst possible
time: at the peak of your business.
Digital North solves this business problem using a technology solution called
load balancing. We can deploy your website across multiple web servers so that several systems
are sharing the load. The additional web servers power your website through the peak utilization
periods. If one web server fails due to an application problem then another web server is ready
to take its place. The benefit to your customers is that they see improved website performance
and less downtime. Load balancing requires at least two web servers and a special load balancing
network device. Years ago it would cost tens-of-thousands of dollars to deploy load balancing
services. Digital North has partnered with Coyote Point to deliver cost-effective load balancing.
Digital North load balancing services start at around $500/month.
Load balancing is a smart way to ensure that your customers can always access
resources on your website. Load balancing is easy to implement and inexpensive. Please contact
a Digital North representative if you are interested in learning more about this service.
VI. Rockler.com
Rockler Woodworking and Hardware has been an exciting company to work with
over the past year. We had a chance to catch up with Scott Ekman, Director of Internet Marketing,
this past week.
Digital North: What is Rockler.com?
Rockler.com is the online catalog of Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, a
retailer of woodworking tools and supplies to consumers and small businesses. Rockler has 30
stores throughout the U.S., a 156 page catalog and a thriving Internet site. Rockler was founded
in 1954 and currently has its headquarters and distribution center in Medina, MN.
Digital North: Who are your typical online customers?
Woodworkers tend to be technically advanced, so a large portion of our customers
use our online catalog and subscribe to our e-mail newsletter. They range from retirees
outfitting a shop in their garage to professional cabinetmakers making creating custom kitchens
and built-ins.
Digital North: What website technologies do you use?
Our site uses Macromedia Cold Fusion on Microsoft Windows 2000 servers, with a
Microsoft SQL Server database.
Digital North: Digital North recently installed a load balancing solution for
Rockler.com. How has the Digital North load balancing service impacted your website?
Implementing a load balancing solution is one of the best things we've done. In
the peak traffic weeks before Thanksgiving, our servers were having a hard time keeping up with
demand. And any server glitch would impact hundreds of customers and mean lost sales.
Since we installed the load balancer, server demand has stabilized and we can
rest easier knowing that if one server fails, the other one will
seemlessly handle our customers.
Digital North: Why did you select Digital North as a service partner?
I really liked their focus on business-oriented hosting and managed services.
I didn't want an ISP who hosted a hodge-podge of 'mom and
pop' sites or managed a bunch of dial-up accounts. I wanted someone who understood the
mission-critical needs of businesses like ours, and had first class facilities and business
processes to back it up.
Digital North fit the bill perfectly.
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