By Peter Wolchak

It’s a cliché but it fits: David Jackson was wedged between a rock and a hard place.

As director of online business at eNorthern Financial in Toronto, the online brokerage division of Northern Securities, he was charged with providing a fast and dependable Web site. The only way customers of the small division, which has received about 100 orders a day since its operational launch in May, can place orders is online.

"In the online financial services industry reliability is everything, so if you’re down for a day your customers lose faith in you and your battle to attract and retain them is a lot tougher."

That’s the hard place. Jackson’s rock was an outsourcing agreement with PSINet, a Web hosting company that kept crushing his business through the latter part of last year.

"The service sucked," Jackson said. "We had chronic issues with PSINet so that [some days] 100 per cent of my customers experienced problems.

"And of course customers don’t care about all this underlying stuff, they don’t want to hear ‘It’s not my fault, it’s my ISP.’ They just want your service to work and if it doesn’t they’re not happy.

"It was getting to the point where it was almost a daily occurrence for me to deal with an issue with PSINet."

Although Jackson was fed up, he decided to stay with PSINet until March 2001. Northern Securities was moving its corporate offices in December and Jackson felt it unwise to relocate the data centre around the same time. Also, March would mark the end of the busy RSP season.

But events forced his hand. "The problems [with PSINet] got so bad that I moved in December. I couldn’t take the risk of having our best season not go well because of something that was out of my control, which was the PSI network."

Jackson looked at various Web hosting companies, including Exodus, Bird on a Wire and Q9, before finally settling on the latter, mainly because he felt Q9 offered the best connections to all the major Internet service providers.

"Since I’ve been at Q9 I’ve not had one issue, so it went from a situation where I was on the phone with PSINet for hours a week to one [where] all I do is sign the bill every month."

Fewer hops, better performance

Grocery Gateway promises convenience. Customers click through their shopping list on the Web and a green van drops groceries at the door. Easy.

But if the site is annoyingly slow, the convenience factor drops and customers go elsewhere. That was Brian Miller’s concern. The firm’s vice-president of technology would sit in his head office and watch as customers entered orders through the Web site. He wasn’t interested in whether people bought Tide or Sunlight, but rather in the physical path their queries travelled. Web traffic never follows a straight line from sender to receiver; rather it travels through a series of interconnected Internet routers, with each connection representing one hop. And the more hops, the slower the traffic moves.

Grocery Gateway only does business in Toronto and the surrounding area, but Miller found its traffic was running all over North America. "We were using AT&T and if a customer was an @Home user, for example, we noticed the number of hops going from the customer [to our Web page] was 17 or 20, and we’d actually watch the path as it went down to California or San Francisco or New York before heading back to our server," Miller said.

Grocery Gateway was drawn to Q9 because of its in-house connections to all the major Internet service providers. That means a request from a home shopper using Sprint, for example, travels a fairly direct path to Q9 and then on to the Grocery Gateway server. "Our number of hops has been reduced by about half," Miller said.

Jackson at eNorthern had a similar experience. "When I was with PSINet, my customers in British Columbia using Telus had their traffic flowing down the West Coast, through California, over to Chicago, back up to Montreal and then over to Toronto. The [traffic slowed] because of its route. With Q9, most users are less than six hops away from me."

Ultimate reliability

Gordon Divitt is also in the online finance game. His company, Toronto-based CertaPay, provides a real-time mechanism through which users e-mail payments to individuals or businesses.

CertaPay operates in conjunction with CIBC, the Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank and TD Canada Trust, partners who demand absolute reliability and security. As executive vice-president of operations, this is Divitt’s responsibility.

"If we go down it would look like the bank went down. We looked at the bank’s operating model, their availability, uptime and response time, and then went looking for solutions to meet those expectations. Q9 offered the best price/availability package."

Divitt has two installations at Q9: one set of servers run the CertaPay production environment, the second supply real-time emergency back-up. Each server is itself redundant, sporting two power supplies, two processors, etc. But even with that level of redundancy Divitt decided to take an extra step, contracting with hosting centre Comdisco in Mississauga, Ont., to back-up his main Q9 site. "The Mississauga site is patched [to Q9] so I can migrate my applications to Comdisco [in real-time]. Every time we update our database we send a copy of the change to Comdisco. And then every 30 minutes we do a tape backup [of any new data] and once a day a third party takes that tape off-site.

"It’s an expensive solution, but given the nature of our business we thought we’d go the extra distance."

The point of all the equipment, Divitt said, is credibility. "If we had a business interruption of, say, four hours, the banks would question our ability to provide them with services. The cost of losing credibility is more important than the dollars involved in an outage. Credibility means we have to be there 100 per cent of the time."