At Wende Technologies, we make use of Open Source technologies such as FreeBSD & Apache to run our web servers, using PHP & MySQL to power our web sites. This technology is not only free (as in no cost), but it is open for modification by anyone. This lowers both "cost of ownership" and "cost of development" - which transfers to savings, savings that we pass on to our clients. Open Source does NOT mean that you do not own your site, or that others can "steal" your site.

What it does mean is we can use the source code, and build up from it by adding our own code and technology to it to create your custom web site, which you will own completely -- right down to the source code. Should you choose to take your web site to another host or developer at some point, they will have full access to everything that drives your web site. Wende Technologies does not retain any "downstream" rights nor do our clients have to pay any fees or royalties to anyone.

From OpenSource.org:

"The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits."

	Wende Technologies specializes in creating dynamic, database driven sites powered by PHP, which, is in our humble opinion, the BEST language for web development.
From Zend.com : Why another language like PHP? People often ask " why invent another language; don't we have enough"? PHP is simply a matter of "the right tool for the right job". over time, developers realized a need for a language like PHP. Those developers first collaborated with Rasmus and then later with Zeev and Andi, to develop PHP, a server-side scripting language which they felt would be ideal for developing dynamic Web-based sites and applications. PHP was created with these particular needs in mind. Moreover, PHP code was developed for embedment within HTML. In doing so, it was hoped that PHP would have benefits such as quicker response time, improved security, and transparency to the end user. Considering that almost a million and a half sites are currently running PHP (at the time of this article's publication), it would appear that these developers were right about PHP. PHP has evolved into a language or environment that has a very specific range of tasks in mind. PHP is, in Stig's humble opinion, pretty close to the ideal tool.
	Wende Technologies uses the superfast MySQL database for all our sites. This MySQL database provides excellent speed and flexibility for web applications. It is also the database of choice when using PHP - with a huge amount of built-in flexibility.
From MySQL.com : The MySQL database server embodies an ingenious software architecture that maximises speed and customisability. With its Extensive reuse of pieces of code within the MySQL software and an ambition to produce minimalistic but functionally rich features have resulted in a database management system unmatched in speed, compactness, stability and ease of deployment. With MySQL, the unique separation of the core server from the storage engine makes it possible to run MySQL under strict transaction control or with ultrafast transactionless disk access. Use MySQL with whichever is most appropriate for the situation. Today MySQL is the most popular open source database server in the world with more than 4 million MySQL installations powering websites, datawarehouses, business applications, logging systems and more. Why uses MySQL? Customers such as Yahoo! Finance, MP3.com, Motorola, NASA, Silicon Graphics, and Texas Instruments use the MySQL server in mission-critical applications.

Wende Technologies sites are hosted on dedicated webservers running on the FreeBSD version of Unix. Wende Technologies servers are EXTREMELY stable and easily handle high loads and high demand.

From ServerWatch.com : FreeBSD -- Is it the perfect Internet server operating system? As close as it comes. The best way to judge FreeBSD, a faithful implementation of BSD UNIX 4.4 for the PC architecture, is to look at who uses it and under what circumstances - and the FreeBSD list has its share of heavyweights: Yahoo uses FreeBSD and Apache to power one of the most popular Web servers on the Internet. The MP3.com Web site uses FreeBSD and Apache to serve pages and mp3 music files. Microsoft uses FreeBSD -- not Windows NT -- to power its Hotmail electronic-mail servers. Now, to be fair to Microsoft, the software giant does indeed use Windows NT and IIS for most of its corporate site's Web servers (www.microsoft.com), and the usage of FreeBSD and Apache represents only a small portion of the Microsoft Internet empire. Still, if FreeBSD is good enough for Bill Gates (on some small level) and the folks at Yahoo (on a much larger scale), it should be good enough for your Web server, whether you're implementing an small business intranet or an enterprise-level Web server devoted to electronic commerce. Why is FreeBSD such a popular choice for industrial-grade Web serving, even though it's an operating system built to run on Intel-based PCs? Bottom line? It's because FreeBSD is known for having one of the fastest TCP/IP stacks in the operating-system world. FreeBSD or Linux? There is the temptation to lump FreeBSD together with Linux. And, indeed, there are a number of similarities between the two operating systems -- software developed for one operating system can easily be moved to the other operating system (or run directly, now that most Linux distributions and FreeBSD feature iBCS compatibility), and much of Linux's networking capabilities come from BSD sources. Both work in roughly the same way, following UNIX conventions in terms of file locations filesystem structures. Both use the X Window System for graphics (and both will support Motif and CDE with third-party software), both use many of the same tools from the Free Software Foundation (including gcc) and in general if a software vendor supports Linux they will support FreeBSD as well. However, FreeBSD was built from the beginning as a version of the Cal-Berkeley BSD -- 4.4BSD-Lite -- and as such has serious roots in "West Coast" UNIX. This isn't true of Linux, which began life more as a pure UNIX workalike with some serious System V biases and it didn't contain any source code from an existing UNIX distribution. In addition, because FreeBSD was built for heavy-duty networking from the get go (Blue Mountain Arts, creators of the popular Internet site of the same name, handles 1,000 requests per second using FreeBSD), it can handle the high-traffic situations that Linux (and Windows NT) cannot.