Those of our customers who have only known us as a web agency so far may be surprised to learn thatpunkt.deGmbH also offers application hosting in its own data center. Its portfolio ranges from standardized TYPO3 operations to customized, high-availability cluster solutions. In their day-to-day operations, the technical team atpunkt.derelies largely on open-source technologies. I found out why through interviews with my colleagues.
The Beginnings of punkt.de Hosting
punkt.de was founded in 1996 as WEB Internet Services. At the time, “the Internet” as a service was truly uncharted territory. In addition to Internet access—that is, the connectivity business—we were already offering email and website hosting as services back then. Patrick M. Hausen, one of the partners since 1997, recalls: “At first, the main thing was simply to be able to offer a service at all. The development of Internet standards and their implementation as open-source software went hand in hand. After all, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had been founded just three years earlier.”
To this day, in many areas, new technologies are first made available as open-source versions. As a service provider that is technically “on the front lines,” it therefore makes sense for us to use and participate in such development projects. punkt.de We are actively involved in the TYPO3, Neos, and FreeBSD communities, among others—the core technologies behind our custom web and hosting solutions.
“Open source gives us the ability to customize software to our customers’ needs. Often, this is what makes a particular solution possible in the first place. Even when there are bugs in the code, we have better analysis options than with proprietary products. Often, we can provide a suggested solution along with the bug report, thereby helping the entire community improve the product.”
This also pleases Joachim Mathes, who discovered the open-source system Linux through a friend and subsequently developed a passion for computer science. The fact that we atpunkt.defocus primarily on open source is what motivated him to apply specifically with us eight years ago. Today, he is one of the core developers responsible for the operation of our data center.
Do we use only open-source software for hosting?
"The fact that open-source software often provides the best solution for a given requirement doesn't, of course, mean that we rely exclusively on open source," explains Jörg Schweizer. “Especially in the area of network infrastructure, there’s really no getting around the products from established manufacturers, whether they’re routers, switches, or, for example, our load balancers and firewalls. It would be very labor-intensive to replace all these products with open-source alternatives because we’d need more specialists to manage and maintain the entire system.”
“We’d rather focus on developing innovative products like the proServer and customized, comprehensive hosting solutions for our customers,” Jörg continues. Wolfgang Zenker adds that we don’t need to reinvent what others have already developed well—but we can use it as a foundation and improve upon it with our expertise. Occasionally, there really is no open-source alternative. For example, we use JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian for all our project management, and the Axigen mail server for our customers’ mailboxes. We’ve tested open-source alternatives, but there were always crucial features missing.
At first glance, the number of proprietary products may seem high, but the list of open-source software used in our hosting is much longer. The most important piece of software here is the FreeBSD operating system, which forms the foundation of our entire hosting architecture. “Infrastructure instead of product” is the philosophy of the FreeBSD project, and it enables us in many ways to provide a customized hosting architecture. For example, our proServer is based on the ZFS file system and the Jails container solution, both of which are components of FreeBSD. Virtually all services operated and offered on this basis—web servers, application platforms, databases, monitoring—are built on open-source projects.
In addition to FreeBSD, our technicians’ favorite open-source tools include Ansible, Emacs, Python, and the UNIX shell—without which daily work “would be a lot more cumbersome,” as Wolfgang explains to me.
Risks Associated with the Use of Open-Source Software
Open-source products are often assumed to pose a higher security risk. After all, the entire code is equally accessible to developers and potential attackers alike. However, as Patrick assures me, it is precisely the collaboration of many developers spread across the globe on the same product that tends to increase rather than decrease security. When problems are discovered, they are fixed very quickly. To quote Eric S. Raymond, author of the book *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
Atpunkt.de, we see one of our core tasks as supporting customers in assessing security risks and prioritizing updates. Regular investment in maintenance and updates for the software in use is essential in this regard. In this regard, open-source is no different from closed-source: all projects of a certain size specify support periods for individual versions of the software, during which the product is reliably supplied with updates. This provides planning certainty during operation.
Joachim raised another point that may cause customers to hesitate when adopting open-source software: there is no legally responsible point of contact for the software. Here, we see ourselves as a service provider that fills this gap and delivers the desired support. Furthermore, closed-source software is often sold with license terms that categorically exclude any warranty or even the software’s fitness for a particular purpose. As a result, the sense of security it provides is only illusory.
Why Open Source Is Better
Open source enables us to offer innovative services and products such as proServer. The close-knit network within the community ensures the transfer of expertise, short development cycles, and attractive features, since there is, of course, competition among rival systems even within the open-source world.
Our customers receive a state-of-the-art product that is optimally tailored to their specific requirements. With proServer, we have created a hosting platform that combines the advantages of “managed hosting” with those of a “root server.” The experience we’ve gained during development is fed back into the FreeBSD community, contributing to its continuous development and improvement.
