BlackSun

This latest installment in the "Meet the Resellers" series features Steve Rogoschewsky, CEO of BlackSun, a fast-growing Canadian web hosting company.

James McNally (JM): How long has BlackSun been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Steve Rogoschewsky (SR): BlackSun was founded in 1998 and offers high availability hosting, domain name registration, dedicated servers, colocation services, and email solutions. We recently expanded our data center in order to provide the infrastructure requirements for entering into our Cloud Computing phase.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company's history?

SR: The people who work here are the big difference — most of our staff come from non-IT backgrounds and bring a new perspective to the industry. Each and every employee at BlackSun has a hand in shaping the company and the direction we take as a business. As such everyone has a vested interest in the success of the company — you can see the results of this connection in the care and attention paid to every detail of our operations.

This unique conglomerate of personalities and backgrounds has made for not only some great innovations and ideas, but an interesting office dynamic and corporate identity. Our name, BlackSun, was derived from an episode of Space 1999 entitled “Journey to the BlackSun". The television series exemplified the process of overcoming impossible odds and achieving lofty goals — a motif still active within our company today and a clear example of individual employee influences. Similarly, our "Customer Service 2.0" brand is attributed to the personal touch customers receive at BlackSun.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

SR: I started out with internet consulting, primarily helping clients succeed in establishing an online presence. BlackSun web hosting was actually born out of frustration at not being able to find reliable web hosting services in Canada, and the focus of BlackSun was established around providing personalized service based on the customer's individual web hosting needs.

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

SR: BlackSun is located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is a great place to establish a hosting facility. We are the only web hosting company in the world that can boast being "farthest from a fault line", free from earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and weather. Nothing much goes on here, making it a great place to put your data!

Saskatoon in Winter

Saskatoon is a city of about 250,000 and has a great entrepreneurial spirit. Innovation Place Research Park, where we are located, has a mandate to employ sustainable building design and operation. As such our corporate offices and data centers are housed in one of the few "Go Green Plus" certified buildings in Saskatchewan, giving us a head start in building an environmentally sustainable business platform.

I should mention that we also have technical support and sales staff in Alberta, British Columbia, and Sweden.

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

SR: We have always been an OpenSRS reseller, and we love getting the same "personalized service" that we are proud to give our customers. We consider OpenSRS more of a partner than a vendor.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

SR: I think if we got together more often in person, this would really enhance the relationship.

JM: I'll take that as an open invitation!

Special thanks to Flickr user Martin Cathrae for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.