Webvanta and Open Source

Webvanta is built on a foundation of open-source software: Ruby on Rails, Linux, MySQL, Nginx, Blueprint CSS, jQuery, and dozens of smaller packages. Webvanta's system builds upon these open-source tools to give you a fully integrated, supported environment that abstracts away all the complexity of those technologies.

We sort through the vast, sometimes chaotic world of open-source software, pick the best, and make it available to you in an easy-to-use, stable way.

Pros and Cons of Open-Source CMSs

When working with an open-source content management system, such as Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla, you have the benefit of a large community and hundreds or thousands of extensions.

This cornocopia of choice has its drawbacks, however:

• When the core software gets updated, compatibility with existing extensions is sometimes compromised.
• Documentation is often sketchy, and designed for programmers rather than designers.
• There's no help desk to call, and the developers of the software often aren't available if you need customizations.
• You're on your own to make sure all the pieces work together.
• You need to keep up with security patches or risk having your site hacked.

We believe that open source is great for developers, but often not so great for designers. If you want to focus on design and content, you may not want to spend your time keeping up with vagaries of open-source software. We do that for you, so you are freed to focus on what you do best. And because we leverage this work across many designers and many sites, we can afford to stay on top of it all.

Benefits of a Hosted Solution

If you manage your own server, in addtion to all the issues listed above, you must make sure your database is frequently backed up, and keep everything running 24/7.

With Webvanta, you pay a modest monthly fee for your sites to be hosted on our system. When you add up all the costs of maintaining open-source software, assuming you place some value on your time, Webvanta is actually much less expensive than "free" software.