5701 Lonetree Blvd.
Rocklin, CA 95765
|
(916) 920-4730 |
When comparing us with others please consider this: we know Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP well enough to literally write the Bibles and references that others read, use as references to do their work, and even study them to get certifications like RHCE! 
Want an ethical, published technology partner instead of a bean-counting consultant?
What sets us apart from the crowd is the fact that our competency in Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) platform is not based on some books that we read. Our expertise is honed from hard work over a decade of professional development work. We are so confident that we know what we’re talking about that we wrote a dozen well-received books to prove it. Tens of thousands of today’s Web technology professionals have learned their skills from our published books all around the globe in all major languages.
Just because we use open source technologies, it does not imply that we dislike or hate some other platform. We simply happen to choose a platform that fostered the best learning prospects, flexibility and rewards for our conditions. If some new technology comes our way in the future that can do a better job, we are certainly going to jump on it as soon as we can. The goal for us to use the right tool for the job and evolve our learning as technology changes.
We choose technology objectively using an evolutionary process: time to market, learning curve and economy of scale.
Lot of companies in our arena claim to know Linux. But not a lot can claim to have written a dozen books about Linux or LAMP technologies! We can.
We use CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise in production and development environment.
Our introduction to Linux was in the early 90s with a dozen 1.44 megabyte floppy disks filled with binary packages from an old FTP site called simtel.net. Our prior experiences with VMS, NeXTSTEP, SunOS, HP-UX, let us to believe that Linux for the x86 platform would be the ideal server platform for us. So we learned it well.
In fact, so well that we ended up writing many of the early server books on Linux including Red Hat Press books like Red Hat Security and Optimization, Red Hat Server Handbook, Red Hat Linux Server 9, Red Hat Linux Server 8, Red Hat Linux Server 7, SuSe Linux Server, etc.
Check out our books @ Amazon.com
Apache still runs the prime-time shows on the Web. As the authors of Apache Bible, we know how to tweak, tune, and configure it well to get the best performance, security and scalability.
Apache is a great Web server and for majority of the small to mid-range companies, it works perfectly. However, if you happen to need more performance for say a site that receives millions of hits per day, we will deploy a few friends of Apache: lighthttpd, litespeed, etc. to speed up your PHP apps by many orders of magnitude!
We use PHP because it is highly productive when it comes to Web application development and not because it the most scalable or robust language for the Web. PHP is the most affordable choice for Web development today.
Honestly, only the die-hard PHP fans who often lack real software engineering skills will tell you that PHP is the best because Facebook runs PHP and Facebook has hundreds of millions of users. So PHP must be very scalable for your Web app needs. What they don’t know or won’t tell you is the real facts — Facebook does use PHP but they compile most of their critical PHP code into highly optimized C++ code using something called a HipHop transformer! So effectively, they use PHP only because they have a small development team, about one software engineer for each million users, and they need more engineers writing application code than worrying about the complex C++ coding disciplines.
We tell our customers what the facts are and also remind them that the choices we make are driven by reality of life and available resources. If you feel PHP is not for you, good luck with other languages that eats up resources unless you get lucky and hire the perfect developers, wait, they work for Google, Apple and Facebook. Sorry!
We are able to get work done, scale PHP applications using tricks and tuning practices including caching opcode — the bits and bytes that PHP interpreter creates every time it runs a non-cached PHP app — and using memory caching techniques that *are* used by Facebook. Of course, if needed we can get your PHP applications to also compile as C++ using HipHop! Everything depends on available resources (spells: financing and time to market).
MySQL is an awesome database for most Web apps when you compare the cost of running Oracle, DB2, etc. No one in their right mind should run Oracle or DB2 without a full-time DBA on-site; but, hundreds of thousands of Web sites of various scale do run MySQL, mostly untuned and have never been blessed by a real DBA of any kind.
Fortunately, without our ability to tune MySQL, we can get a great deal of performance out of it without paying for costly license fees by CPU or whatever else Oracle, DB2, etc. wants to charge you.
We routinely use MySQL replication to create read/write heads for database so that we can direct reader apps to read-only replica databases and writer apps to master database. This increases performance, reliability, and scalability.