Technologies We Use

WebSight Designs meets your web hosting, e-mail hosting, and dns hosting needs entirely through the use of Open Source software. Open Source software is not only free, it's far superior to any other server software on the market today. Below please find a list of the software we run along with descriptions and links to their respective websites.

Slackware Linux - The distribution of Linux we run is Slackware. Everyone in the world of Linux has their favorite Linux distribution, but we personally feel that Slackware is the best out there. Slackware has a package management system, like many other distributions, but we compile all software we use by hand for greater control over advanced features and for better overall security.

Apache HTTP Server - The HTTP Daemon we run is Apache, which is the most widely used HTTP server on the internet today. Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. The October 2004 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that more than 67% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined.

BIND DNS Server - The BIND DNS Server is used on the vast majority of name serving machines on the Internet, providing a robust and stable architecture on top of which an organization's naming architecture can be built. The resolver library included in the BIND distribution provides the standard APIs for translation between domain names and Internet addresses and is intended to be linked with applications requiring name service.

qmail Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) - qmail is a secure, reliable, efficient, simple message transfer agent. It is designed for typical Internet-connected UNIX hosts. As of October 2001, qmail is the second most common SMTP server on the Internet, and has by far the fastest growth of any SMTP server.

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - PHP is a widely-used general-purpose server-side scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. According to Netcraft's Survey, 17,826,404 domains, and 1,318,739 IP addresses are running PHP in December of 2004, making it the most popular Apache module.

MySQL - The MySQL database server is the world's most popular open source database. Over five million installations use MySQL to power high-volume Web sites and other critical business systems - including industry-leaders like The Associated Press, Google, NASA, Sabre Holdings and Suzuki.

Perl - Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl.

GWARE - Our Linux desktops and laptops run GWARE. GWARE is a robust, unintrusive installation of the GNOME Desktop Environment for Slackware Linux.