It's Safe to Look at the Blacksun

Blacksun, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, is a webhost that aims to compete with larger companies by offering better service and better reliability to customers of all sizes.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [June 3, 2002]

Blacksun is a webhosting provider of the all-Sun-all-Cisco-equipment persuasion, operating out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada's Midwest. Small and detail-oriented, the company maintains that money can be made from customers who, on average, pay less than $100 per month.

Steve Rogoschewsky is the vice president and co-founder of Blacksun. Rogoschewsky's partner, Jay Tingley, is Blacksun's CEO. We spoke to Rogoschewsky because he covers the technical side, while Tingley focuses more on marketing and business development.

The company uses Cisco 7200 routers and 2950 switches, and a variety of Sun Cobalt products for webhosting, focusing currently on the RaQ XTR (expecting to upgrade some customers to the new and more powerful RaQ 550).

With a total of about 130 Cobalt products in various configurations— including 20 RaQ XTRs hosting several thousand websites—Blacksun is an independent service provider generating substantial revenues.

It runs . . . and runs . . . and runs
"Our down time is minimal," Rogoschewsky reports. "Many of our servers have been up for over 300 days—which is the last time we had to move a lot of them to make room for more equipment. We use only vendors we trust."

"We use all blue stuff," he enthuses (referring to the trademark case color of Cobalt's products). "It's fast, reliable, and easy to manage and set up. Our users are in control of site administration. They have access and appreciate a certain amount of control," Rogoschewsky continues.

"The Cobalt system is easier to administer than a Windows environment. This ease of use has contributed to our success. We're managing thousands of websites and we certainly don't want to make changes ourselves. Instead, we'd rather provide high quality phone support and we think it pays to do so," he claims.

"We have had a lot of success from word of mouth. When we ask users in our sign up form where they came from, they almost always mention a current customer (in part because we have a referral program)."

Keeping customer service in-house
Blacksun runs its own call center that can answer almost any question quickly, partly because more than one person can be involved in any call. "80 to 90 percent of all calls should be answered by the first tech, although of course if there were an advanced issue it would be escalated," says Rogoschewsky .

Using Sun Cobalt's open environment, Blacksun is working with specific software vendors to add features to the company's offering, to distinguish it from the competition. With quantified.com, Blacksun is working to integrate the Urchin website statistics program into the Cobalt RaQ XTR software to provide free statistics to all customers. Blacksun is also working with Aladdin to provide data backup for customers with Macintosh and Windows PCs.

Blacksun uses two backbone providers, Sprint Canada and local CLEC GT Telecom.

Service level aggrements with attitude
Blacksun does provide SLAs, which vary depending on the price of the plan. Low end plans guarantee 99.9 percent uptime and high end plans guarantee 99.99 percent uptime. These guarantees may seem low, but Blacksun's SLAs have real teeth. Blacksun offers a full month of free service if it fails to meet the SLA.

Rogoschewsky explains, "I think SLAs are very complex, far more complex than the numbers show. We've got our own network SLAs and equipment SLAs. The bottom line is that customers expect reliability, as close to 100 percent as possible. That's why, with our new signup deal, we offer a 30 day free trial. We'll know quickly whether or not there are problems with a site—although these are rare and we hit the 100 percent mark in many months."

One company that Blacksun trusts enough to rely on is TUCOWS' OpenSRS, which Blacksun uses for domain registration. Asked about problems with false invoices stealing customers, he did not comment but pointed us to the website of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where we found this notice.

Maintaining the human touch
Blacksun is courting new companies by offering free domain registration to new customers. "We figure anyone who needs to register a new domain is probably just starting out. This type of customer might upgrade to a higher level plan."

As for billing, Rogoschewsky will not rely on software. "We're an Internet company with no face-to-face contact with customers, so attention to detail in all areas is important. All our business comes through our website but then it goes through billing which is a human department. Bills pass by human eyes for approval. We feel that the benefits of eliminating mistakes make it worthwhile to keep a hands on approach."

Blacksun's plan seems simple: Grow organically, manage as much as you can, buy from the best vendors, and only outsource something that you cannot do yourself—even then, only to a company with a sterling reputation.

This sun is one to watch.

—End