Those of our customers who have previously only known us as a web agency may be surprised to learn that punkt.de GmbH also offers application hosting in its own data center. The portfolio ranges from the standardized operation of TYPO3 to individual high-availability cluster solutions. The colleagues in the technical department at punkt.de largely rely 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 that time, "Internet" as a service was indeed new territory. In addition to Internet access, i.e. the line business, we were already offering e-mail and website hosting as services back then. Patrick M. Hausen, one of the partners since 1997, remembers: "At first it was important to be able to offer a service at all. The development of Internet standards and implementation as open source software went hand in hand. The founding of the World Wide Web Consortium (w3C) was just 3 years ago."

To this day, in many areas, new technologies are first made available as open source versions. As a service provider that "fights on the front line" of technology, the use of and participation in corresponding development projects is therefore obvious. punkt.de is involved in the TYPO3, Neos and FreeBSD communities, among others, the basic technologies for our individual web and hosting solutions.

"Open source gives us the opportunity to adapt software to the needs of our customers. This is often what makes a particular solution possible in the first place. We also have better analysis options for errors in the code than with closed products. You can often provide a suggested solution with the error description and thus help the entire community to improve the product."

This also pleases Joachim Mathes, who discovered the Linux open source system through one of his friends and subsequently his passion for computer science. The fact that we work primarily with open source at punkt.de prompted him to apply for a job with us eight years ago. Today, he is one of the core developers for the operation of our data center.

Do we only use open source software for hosting?

"The fact that open source software often provides the best solution for a given requirement does not, of course, mean that we rely exclusively on open source," explains Jörg Schweizer. "Particularly in the area of network infrastructure, there is little getting around the products of established manufacturers, be it routers, switches or, for example, our load balancers and firewalls. It would be very difficult to replace all these products with open source, because we would need more specialists to support and maintain the whole thing."

"We prefer to concentrate on developing innovative products such as the proServer and individual holistic hosting solutions for our customers," Jörg continues. Wolfgang Zenker adds that we don't have to reinvent what others have already developed well - but we can take this as a basis and improve it with our know-how. Sometimes there really is no alternative from the open source sector. For example, we also use JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian for our entire project management or the Axigen mail server for our customers' mailboxes. We have tested open source alternatives, but there were always crucial features that were missing.

At first glance, the number of closed products seems high, but the list of open source software used in our hosting is much longer. The most important software here is the FreeBSD operating system, which forms the basis of the entire hosting architecture. "Infrastructure instead of product" is the philosophy of the FreeBSD project and it enables us to provide a customized hosting architecture in a variety of ways. 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 server, application platform, database, monitoring - are based on open source projects.

In addition to FreeBSD, the most popular open source tools used by our technicians include Ansible, Emacs, Python and the UNIX shell, without which day-to-day work "would be a lot more complicated", as Wolfgang explains to me.

Risks in the use of open source software

Open source products are often assumed to have a higher security risk. After all, the entire code is open to developers and potential attackers alike. However, as Patrick assures me, it is precisely the collaboration of many globally distributed developers on the same product that increases rather than decreases security. If 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".

At punkt.de, we see one of our core tasks as supporting the customer in assessing security risks and prioritizing updates. Regular investment in maintenance and updates of the software used is essential. In this respect, open source is no different from closed source: all projects of a certain size specify support periods for individual versions of the software within which the product is reliably supplied with updates. This creates planning security during operation.

Joachim brought up another point that may make customers hesitate to use open source software: there is no legally responsible contact person for the software. We see ourselves as a service provider that fills this gap and provides the desired support. On the other hand, closed source is often sold with license conditions that categorically exclude any warranty or even the suitability of the software for a specific purpose. The security is therefore only a supposed one.

Why open source is better

Open source enables us to offer innovative services and products such as the proServer. The close networking within the community ensures know-how transfer, short development cycles and attractive features, as there is naturally competition between competing systems within the open source world.

Our customers receive a state-of-the-art product that is optimally designed to meet their specific requirements. With the proServer, we have created a hosting platform that combines the advantages of managed hosting with those of a root server. The experience we have gained during development is fed back into the FreeBSD community and helps with continuous further development and improvement.