Minnesota Landmarks is a non-profit agency commissioned by Ramsey County to manage and maintain Landmark Center, the historic Old Federal Courts Building, in downtown St. Paul.

Landmark Center is a busy building with five museums, a school, event space and community programs. Many of St. Paul's arts and cultural non-profit agencies including The Schubert Club and the St. Paul City Ballet are tenants. There is a gift shop, a theater, and a cafe.

The Story

Minnesota Landmarks uses ipHouse DSL and clustered web and email hosting services to help fulfill their two-fold mission: to preserve and maintain Landmark Center as an historic monument and to sponsor activities that enhance the quality of life in the community.

Landmark Center events range from the behind-the-scenes "Nooks & Crannies" tour, to fall's Great Pumpkin Festival to various concerts, dances, cultural and educational programs. Much of the advertising and promotional efforts for these programs go through Minnesota Landmark's ipHouse hosted email. Dina Vaynerman, the Program/Marketing Manager at Minnesota Landmarks, frequently sends large attachments with ease. "We send large files all the time. This is the really great thing about using ipHouse. The server never crashes when we send giant, high-resolution files and photos. It just always goes through. It makes us able to do our job."

Steve Budas, the Executive Assistant at Minnesota Landmarks and the default IT person, appreciates ipHouse's exclusive ipMom web tools. The tools allow Minnesota Landmark employees to directly administer their own email accounts. "If they are out of the office for a few days they can easily create and manage their own out-of-office replies. The spam filters are also really good. The spam quarantine summary is nice because we don't have to deal with the spam. Occasionally, we'll get reminded that maybe there is an email message that we need to check into. Instead of having to delete it 20 times, we only delete it once.

"Why did we choose ipHouse? I've been with ipHouse for years. Before I worked for Minnesota Landmarks, I was a web designer. During that time I became familiar with a lot of the ISP services in the Twin Cities. When it came time for Minnesota Landmarks to choose an ISP, I researched what I consider to be the top five companies offering hosting and connectivity services. Once we compared service and pricing, it was a no-brainer to choose ipHouse."

The decision to use ipHouse was validated immediately. When Minnesota Landmarks initially transferred their DSL service to ipHouse they experienced problems. ipHouse's technical support team helped determine the troubles were twofold. Both Minnesota Landmarks' existing DSL hardware and the provisioning of their CenturyLink DSL line had issues. The ipHouse team worked with Minnesota Landmarks and directly with CenturyLink until all the problems were solved and service was operational. "I have no doubt that the extra efforts of ipHouse greatly minimized our downtime. The excellent service went beyond our expectations."