Posted by: Monty Sooter, CTO

It is interesting when a neighbor asks me what I do for a living. I usually say I do computer stuff, and then there is no telling where the conversation is going. A common response that I like to receive is, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then we end up talking about the latest weather or how the kids are doing. The conversation I love to have is, “It’s incredible how the Internet has transformed business/life in the past decade,” and then I get to tell them about ClickBank. The conversations I try to avoid are, “I’m having a problem with this free software package on Windows 95.” I usually try to be patient, but I know there is a slim chance they will get help from me or anyone else. It would be less painful to just give them a thousand bucks for a new PC.

At work I have similar conversations. Some of my fellow co-workers do occasionally ask me what I do for a living; I hope they’re kidding. We do have great conversations about how ClickBank is transforming business. All of us have had many “traditional” business experiences, but ClickBank is the one that we view as the most transforming business experience in our careers. It is still amazing how this affiliate-driven digital goods business model provides so many benefits to folks across the globe, and it is only going to get bigger and better.

At ClickBank, we know that to “take care of business” we have to be able to adapt quickly to any problem that comes our way. Our thousands of affiliates and publishers rely on our IT systems to keep their businesses running at all times. Unlike most companies, our IT infrastructure doesn’t only affect our ability to do business; it affects the livelihood of our clients as well. It would be nice if we were only presented with easy problems, such as a failure of one piece of equipment, the failure of one network connection, or the failure of one database. Instead, we have to be ready to take care of the difficult problems, like a partial failure of one disk that corrupts one sector of a replicated database in the secondary data center.

We prepare to take care of these difficult problems when (not if) they happen by buying fully supported network gear and servers, purchasing support for all of the software products we use in production, and having redundant systems in two data centers. In each of the data centers, we have redundancy in the most critical hardware (database servers) to ensure that any failures do not impact business. Most of our software is open source and we make sure we have support contracts in place. We also take the time to perform regular hardware and software maintenance to make the most of our support contracts.

It is less painful and smarter to have put in the extra time and spent the extra bucks to have all the right hardware and software in place to make sure we are “taking care of business” for our many clients. It also means that I don’t have to ask my neighbors for help.

About Kristen Meador

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