What makes a web site beneficial to a company? Web technology is best applied to tasks or processes that can be automated and made available across the Internet. Team collaboration, document sharing, customer management, order entry, and online shopping are a few examples where web technologies solve real world business problems, doing so 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That in turn makes for a better bottom line.

Web Technology the Smart Way
In order to make a web site work for your company, these web applications tailored to your specific business processes must be developed. Ten years ago programming languages such as PERL and PHP were the common way to develop such applications. Since then the software industry has made gigantic leaps forward in the area of web technology.

So it comes as a surprise that developers still use those old programming languages to tackle today's business problems. Ten years ago, developing a web based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution might cost around $30,000.00. A decade later it still costs $30,000.00 because those developers are using the same old tools. Why? Basically: because they are free. Today we have tools that can accomplish more with less. The catch? Having a strong, feature rich platform from which to work.

Vesigo Studios is an early adopter of such new technology, which keeps us on the cutting edge while continually reducing development costs. Most of our clients have enjoyed an honest 99% reduction in development costs, turning a $30,000.00 project into a $300.00 project.

Lower Your Total Cost of Ownership
The term Lower Cost of Ownership assumes that you view the cost of a web solution as a whole, not just portions of it. In other words, how much will a solution cost to plan, build, and maintain. This is where the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 platform shines. For an extra few dollars a month in hosting charges, you can have a state-of-the-art server platform that let's you do more with less.

Having Windows Server 2003 as a foundation for your web site provides access to special development tools, such as ASP.NET, which will save your company throughout the planning, development, and maintenance phases of a project. In our experience we have found projects that used to take around 8 months to complete with old programming languages such as PERL and PHP, can be accomplished within one week using modern tools such as ASP.NET. Your company saves because our platform let's you do more with less.

To illustrate, it may be cheap to buy land in the middle of a dessert. But when it comes to building a house there, would you really choose such a location? The initial investment may be cheap, but in the end will turn out to be far more expensive to build and maintain. Likewise, building web applications on a Linux or Unix platform may be a cheap investment at first, but in the end it will prove to be far more expensive.

The Highest Level of Security and Reliability
At this current juncture there is not a more stable, reliable, and secure operating system available. Microsoft has many critics, and there are those that will rant into the wee hours of the night about Linux and how secure it is. But the facts are simple, and the logic is proven: Microsoft is a 40 Billion dollar company. They put hundreds of millions of dollars more into their software development than any Linux flavor will ever hope to see. Common sense tells us that with those kind of resources, more thorough testing, and more refined development is possible. Although there were many published exploits for Windows 2000, most were reported by Microsoft first, and the problems incurred afterwards were due to system administrators that failed to apply the patches necessary to secure their networks. With Linux, if you are not on top of the network security industry’s e-list, you are apt to find about the latest vulnerability the hard way.

What about Security?
Vesigo Studios has chosen to run all its servers on Windows Server 2003 after participating in the product’s Beta trials for over a year. Within this time we discovered that as where Windows 2000 basically defaulted to “convenience”, Windows Server 2003 defaults to “too secure”. With Windows 2000 any system administrator could set the server up quickly, but at the expense of lower security. Windows Server 2003 is by default completely secure and almost non-functional, it requires a skillful system’s administrator to configure the server for actual use. On a basic install it has considerably less services and ports open than that of a fresh install of most the popular flavors of Linux, and it has been the enduring opinion of our network security group that Windows Server 2003 is tighter than any other OS we have seen.

What about Reliability & Stability?
Concerning reliability, Windows Server 2003 is simply amazing. Our production servers run without incident. Windows Server 2003 has proven extremely resilient in withstanding attacks, run-away programs, and other issues. We no longer lease, or support Linux installations, nor do we offer any flavor of Linux on any dedicated or managed plan. Open-Source Operating systems offer the would-be hacker an open book to research potential vulnerabilities. Thanks, but no thanks. We like the source code for our operating system locked up somewhere safe, and not freely downloadable from the Internet.