ViaWest put Beatport in the customer newsletter.
We were in the Q3 customer corner beside Mozy and a regional health care system. The short description called Beatport the first authentic digital music store built for digital music culture. It talked about legal, high-speed, high-quality downloads for DJs and fans.
That is the public description. My view of Beatport at ViaWest was more physical.
It was racks, power, network connections, load balancers, web servers, database servers, and storage. Earlier that summer I described the environment as nine web servers, five database servers, a thirty-terabyte SAN, and roughly eighty terabytes of traffic each month. Those numbers were already moving.
In August, when I emailed somebody about extra systems work, I said I managed one of the largest hosting accounts in the ViaWest data center. I was proud of that. I was also aware that being large made every mistake more expensive.
The newsletter talked about hybrid hosting. Customers could own hardware and buy managed services for Windows, Linux, clustering, or SAN work. That was the world we were operating in: our equipment and architecture inside a facility with its own power, network, support, and process.
Then the marketing email arrived and turned all of that into a neat customer story.
That is fine. Beatport should be easy to explain from the outside. DJs need music. The store lets them buy it. The infrastructure is only interesting when you are responsible for it.
I was responsible for it, so I saved the newsletter.