Jun 22

Written by:
6/22/2011 11:24 AM 

Our tagline here is "We Help Small Business DO Business in a Big Business World." What's that mean? It means we help small organizations, or groups OF those organizations, to excel in doing what they do best without paying the price tag (in dollars, minutes, or commitments) that is considered "typical" for what they do. We empower them. We enable them. We set them free of chains they didn't know could be loosed.

Consider the Daily Audio Bible Podcast. The DAB is consistently one of the top 5 podcasts in ITunes' "Religion and Spirituality" podcast genre. Right now, the DAB actually has two different podcast in the Top 10. I've had personal ties to this ministry since 2006, when I myself decided I wanted to "read through the Bible in a year," much like thousands of other people who have made the podcast both popular and life changing. As the ministry has grown, though, it's found itself pushing the limits of technology. What used to fit on a $20 / month shared server no longer worked, and then what used to fit on a $100 / month dedicated virtual server no longer did, either. As the DAB continued to push boundaries, founder Brian Hardin continued to find innovative (yet somewhat trial-and-error) ways to make it through those limits.

I was invited into the technology-underground the DAB back in the day when they managed their own forums site, which we have since archived as the DAB has grown into a larger community. I helped with some cleanup after attacks by robots and with some other routines here and there. Then came the opportunity I didn't know I'd been waiting for. Servers couldn't keep up. Hosting accounts got shut down. And we stepped in with an idea to "share the load" between 2 different servers using what's called Round Robin DNS system. This worked great. We added a few more servers soon after, and are now up to ten. The system is easily expandable to many times it's current size, as well, so this model will work for some time to come.

The one drawback to this system was that now, instead of uploading files to a single server, Brian had to upload them to 2, 4, 8, and now 10 different servers each day. That took a lot of time. The DAB is taken "on the road" quite a bit, often even internationally, and uploading files to all the servers proved to be quite the task. In America, on a high speed connection, it would consume about 45 minutes of Brian's day; even if he could get a cup of coffee and work no other projects while the upload ran, the computer - and the internet - still needed to "work." You can imagine what this would be like in India on dialup, or in Africa on a mobile satellite connection. Not a good long-term solution.

In recent months, C2IT partnered with the DAB to bring forth what we've come to call our Mirror Management System. We host a site that Brian uploads each day's podcast to, and that site is then distributed to all of the mirrored servers by a central server. It handles all errors, retries, success and failure notifications, and will even completely synchronize new servers as they are brought online. What used to take 45 minutes now takes 5. And saving 40 minutes a day, in case you don't want to do the math, is the equivalent of over two hundred forty hours of upload and wait time. You do the math. We're saving the DAB time, money, and frustration, all while providing efficiency, automation, and scalable growth.

Another nice feature of this system is that it doesn't require high end servers to "host" the daily podcast files. If you go to almost any of the other top 10 podcasts in ITunes or other Podcast ranking sites and ask them who they use to host their terabytes worth of bandwidth every month, you'll probably get answers like Amazon, Akamai, or Limelight. I remember looking at Amazon's Cloud Services for Brian several years ago when we first implemented this system. It was simple, scalable, and obviously a well known brand. But wow, was it expensive, at least compared to what we were used to. What might cost the DAB $250 / month would cost over $1,500 / month on Amazon CloudFront based on their own calculation tools. So not only are we saving money by saving time, but we're literally saving the ministry dollars in the range of $15,000 every year. That's a lot of money for a young, grass roots, donation supported ministry.

We'd love to take this concept and help other growing ministries and organizations using podcasts get their voice heard. We can handle all of the setup, the maintenance, and even set clients up with a 1-2 page system to manage their sites (podcasts, video feeds, etc.). It's tough breaking into a market where people are used to paying hundreds more every month for the same type of service from a big name company. But it's possible. I really believe it is. It is possible to find small businesses, organizations, and ministries who are on the verge of taking the next step but feel shut down by the "bigness" of it all. It is our aim to build partnerships, products, and systems that truly enable these growing and innovative organizations to be all that they can be by empowering and equipping them with the very best technology has to offer with affordable, scaled, and creative solutions to their problems.

Do you know someone with a dream that's being held back because the "next step" in technology is just too big? We'd love to hear from you or them, to sit down and map out a strategy, to look at things that look like roadblocks and actually see how they might be overcome in other manners. Contact us through our website, or send us an email at info@c2itconsulting.net.