Blacksun

BlackSun is a web hosting company headquartered out of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and services clients across North America and abroad. BlackSun offers web hosting, domain name registration, dedicated servers, colocation services, ecommerce and email solutions. The name BlackSun was derived from an episode of Space 1999 entitled “Journey to the Blacksun. Over the years, Blacksun has grown to host over 10,000 domains and over 30,000 email subscribers in 35 countries.
History
Although BlackSun was originally started as a home-based business in 1998, the company's first office was located at Innovation Place Research Park located on the outskirts of the University of Saskatchewan. Innovation Place is recognized as one of the leading research and technology centers in Canada. BlackSun originally started hosting its services on the Cobalt_Networks raq2 appliance server, which consisted of a 200 MHz MIPS-based microprocessor, and 10 gigabyte hard drive. As technology progressed, BlackSun developed a relationship with the Cobalt_RaQ engineering team, and eventually helped test the next generation Cobalt product line. The progression consisted of the raq2, raq3, raq4, raqXTR. In December (2000) Sun Microsystems purchased cobalt networks, and integrated the Cobalt networks team. BlackSun helped in beta testing their last line known as the Sun Cobalt Raq550, and was the first hosting company to use it in production. Sun Microsystems opensourced its control panel after they abandoned the RaQ550 line of services in 2003.
With the progession of technology, BlackSun's customers still continue to use remnants of the Cobalt control panel look and feel. BlackSun's R&D division continues to support its hosting customers on a customized solution, supported on a hardware agnostic philosophy. The most recent port of the control panel lives on Dell r900 servers, as a dedicated and Virtual_private_server solution for its shared and managed server clients.
Services
BlackSun's main business models are customer service and server reliability. BlackSun offers the following services:
* Web Hosting
* E-commerce Hosting
* Reseller Services
* Domain Registration
* Dedicated Servers
* Co-Location Services
* Data Storage and Back-up Services
* Email Hosting
* Spam and Virus Filtering using Spam Assassin and the Cloudmark Authority
* 24 hour Support
* SSL certificates
* Online storefront services
Recent News
In early 2009, Sasktel Telecommunications decided to look at the possibility of outsourcing their email with a different hosting company possibly outside of Canada. BlackSun was not contacted regarding the possibility of hosting their email addresses despite being a local company and the possibility of more job creation. This caused some concern that Sasktel was not supporting the local economy and their subscribers email being subject to the US Patriot Act that arose from the possibility of an American company hosting the email This issue was covered by several national newspapers and received attention from former Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert as well as other government officials.

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