Cloud Computing

Digital State Media leverages the power of cloud computing to deliver a highly scalable, extremely fault-tolerant solution. Our entire infrastructure runs within the “cloud” of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. In essence, our software is able to dynamically react to load. As traffic increases, new application servers automatically boot, build themselves, and begin accepting new traffic.

Server Virtualization

Server virtualization masks server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems, from server users. The server administrator uses a software application to divide one physical server into multiple isolated virtual environments. The virtual environments are sometimes called virtual private servers, but they are also known as guests, instances, containers or emulations.

Infrastructure

Our infrastructure is resistant to fault because it contains “no single point of failure.” This means that any crucial part of the system (load balancer, web servers, database server) can easily be swapped out if it goes down for any reason. This extremely robust hosting platform allows for an unprecedented level of control over our infrastructure from a systems administration perspective.

Database

Our database is constantly backed up to a secondary server, which is itself backed up every ten minutes to Amazon’s infinitely expandable Simple Storage Solution (S3). The primary database is backed up once per day. If the primary database server becomes temporarily disabled for any reason, we can promote our secondary server to begin accepting connections within 10 minutes of discovery of the problem. We also have the ability to reconstruct a new primary database server from scratch with our backups within half an hour. All of these factors represent an extremely comprehensive data retention system.

Software

Digital State Media’s products has been completely developed and maintained by our in-house development team. Application software is written entirely in PHP/XHTML/CSS, JScript, Java, Ruby on Rails and Microsoft-supported technologies and solutions.

About Ruby on Rails: a fairly new and innovative web framework ideal for creating interactive and flexible web applications. Ruby on Rails also enables us to add new feature additions quickly and conduct maintenance with ease.

Web Design and Development

Our web servers use XAMPP and open source software, which allow us to deliver blazing fast websites with little overhead. We also favor agile development methods that involve our clients in the process and allow us to quickly adapt to the ever-changing technological landscape.

Security and E-Commerce

All Digital State Media server certificates are signed by a recognized Certificate Authority (DigiCert) and use 256-bit SSL encryption for all communication behind the login wall. All communication amongst the database, application, and authentication servers is also conducted via secure connections.

E-Commerce websites are fully secured and tested before deployment.