DigiLink is the hosting company for all Warner Bros Records (WBR) websites

If anyone is looking for validation as to a hosting company that has a proven track record of providing high reliability and performance for Drupal hosting then you might be interested to know that DigiLink (http://www.digilink.net) has been hosting all of WBR's (Warner Bros Records) websites since 2002. We are a lot more than just a hosting company. We completely engineered, from the ground up, a robust, high performance, ultra reliable hosting platform consisting of multiple systems, with multiple redundancies at the networking level, NFS and MySQL using Sun Solaris on both sparc and x86 hardware to meet WBR's specific service, performance and reliability requirements. We installed and currently maintain all of their web hosting and email list server systems in our own facilities at Marina Del Rey, CA. As many of you may already know, WBR represents one of the largest - if not the largest commercial installation and deployment of Drupal technology especially when taking into account the total number of Drupal based websites, hit rate and bandwidth.

Deploying Drupal technology at this scale and level is not a trivial exercise especially for a customer with such high visibility websites. We have over 50+ years of combined staff experience in system's design, administration, programming, dba (both Oracle and MySQL) and of course networking and security. We specialize in Sun hardware (sparc and x86) running Solaris and we have utilized that experience to enable WBR to currently host over 360 websites of which 80+ are Drupal websites with a proven 99.997% availability and performance for the last several years including hosting Tom Petty's website during this year's Super Bowl where he performed at half time. We have accomplished all of this under a *very* limited budget - well less than $2M in total costs to WBR since 2002 and that includes everything from engineering, hardware, support and hosting! We know how to extract the most performance out of systems to maximize our customer's ROI and keep expenses to a minimum. As a company, DigiLink's high performance hosting experience goes back 14+ years having hosted Capitol Records, New Line Cinema, Priority Records and many other similarly high bandwidth, demanding sites.

As you might imagine, most of WBR's websites are quite demanding to host - they have particularly rich designs, features and content and also have huge processing and bandwidth requirements. Our experience with both systems performance, scaling and redundancy has been crucial to WBR's successful deployment of all of their websites but in particular their Drupal websites especially given Drupal's dependence on a MySQL backend. Our database expertise has played a crucial role in being able to scale Drupal technology to the level that is necessary to support such high profile websites. What's more they are probably one of the very few, if not the only hosting platforms that are running on a full 64 bit stack/suite of applications (Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc) on Sun Solaris that we built for them as a result of our expertise in building, packaging and maintaining open source software. We do not rely on Sunfreeware or Solaris Coolstacks as neither has been able to produce a full 64 bit application stack nor a stack that includes all of the additional features and modules (beyond just Drupal) that WBR needs to deliver their web content. We also regularly contribute back to the various open source communities our experience in fixing and building open source applications for 64 bit Solaris systems.

We recently crafted a complete bandwidth monitoring solution that can be used to differentiate and track every website's use of system resources with a full graphical charting interface for the purposes of billing for services. As I am sure you can all appreciate that such a function is hardly straightforward when dealing with multiple Drupal sites that are spread across a server farm through a load balancer. WBR can now see in near real time bandwidth and system resource utilization depicted on mrtg style charts for every one of their sites along with detailed tabular data. This data can then be used to allocate the costs associated with the use of system resources to their various internal customers.

I am not suggesting that we at DigiLink are by any means experts in Drupal itself. On the contrary, the technical staff headed up by Ethan Kaplan at our customer, WBR gets full credit for maximizing the use of Drupal in their website's design. We work with them as a team providing the support and expertise for the underlying systems architecture, software and support for which they have been relying on us 100% since 2002. Our job has been to make them look their best and it is unfortunate that our contributions are essentially unknown in the Drupal community since we are so much behind the scenes. I will be the first to admit that we, as engineers tend to overlook publicizing our abilities as we tend to spend the majority of our time and efforts perfecting our systems and services for the benefit of our customers like WBR.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like any further information.

Sincerely,
Bob Atkins
President/CEO
DigiLink, Inc.
http://www.digilink.net