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Company turns to Rackspace rather than continuing to expand in-house servers.
Entertainment company Columbia House, famous for music club mailings that promise CDs at cutrate prices, has courted business online since 1994. But in the past six months, online interest has really picked up, thanks in part to Columbia House's affiliate partners such as Yahoo and MSN that carry ads enticing users to check out Columbia House music, DVD and video clubs while they surf.
That exposure has resulted in heavyduty traffic to Columbia House's 40 inhouse Sun servers, and it also resulted in heavy-duty thinking on the part of the IT department.
Columbia House uses content delivery network provider Akamai to host Web site images, but that had been about the extent of its outsourced operations.At the beginning of the year, however,Tom Beauchamp, senior vice president and CIO, had a decision to make.
"And the decision was to avoid expansion of our internal environment," he says. "We very quickly came to the conclusion that it was going to be very expensive to expand [in-house]."
As a result, Beauchamp began looking at hosting companies and other outsourcers. Beauchamp wouldn't name the companies he looked at, saying only...