Visiting Firehost

While visiting with our friends at MODX in Dallas, TX, we also took the opportunity to visit Firehost. We’ll have much more info about our relationship with Firehost (and the hotness that is our forthcoming geographically redundant, high availability, Visa CISP Level 1 PCI Compliant environment we’ve been working on for the past year) in the coming months with the launch of our new www website, but in the meantime we wanted to share some quick pictures of the visit.

The first bit of neat was this:

Visitor badge with expiring indication

That’s the visitor badge, required for any visitor to walk through the security doors past the lobby. What’s particularly interesting is that the red “V” has a gray grid (just barely visible in this picture). After a few hours, that gray grid will turn very dark, indicating that the visitor badge is old, and should not be trusted. (In this picture, the badge is about an hour and a half old.) Nice attention to the details on their security at this level.

Here’s me with Mike Shaughnessy, who ensures we are treated like a big fish in a small pond, even if that’s not the case.

And here’s Chris Drake, the CEO of Firehost. Having worked at datacenters and colocation providers, I can say with confidence that Chris is amazing where it counts the most: developing and maintaining a fantastic team of high quality individuals, and empowering them to serve their customers as best they can.

Perhaps interesting to note is that we don’t have a picture of the datacenter where the FoxyCart servers reside. Firehost goes above and beyond the Tier 4 requirements with their datacenter, and they don’t let anybody into datacenter without a complete background check. A full background check just to sate my curiosity wasn’t a good use of resources, so we didn’t get pictures of the physical environment where our application resides. (Or rather, no pictures of our application environment in Texas. We do have a failover environment in Arizona that we’ll be blogging about in the coming months. But no pictures of that either, since that’s with Firehost as well.)

We’re excited to have been able to visit with Firehost, and we’re more excited to share with you the details of some of the improvements we’ve been making to our infrastructure. More about that in a future post though.

—Brett, Co-Founder