We choose UNIX for our web servers because management and scalability is critical. We securely mirror our web sites using ``Stage'' [Ches] which is only available on UNIX but is available to the public in source code form. Customers that wish to have external web pages maintain them on an internal server which is mirrored to the outside using ``Stage''. If our external web server were broken into, we could format the disks, reload the software, and ``Stage'' would copy the web pages back into place.
Our web proxy/cache is a Netscape Proxy Server [NSPS] running on a Sun Sparc Ultra running Solaris 2.6. While we use a transparent firewall [LMF] (i.e. one that does not require SOCKS or other proxies) users are encouraged to point their web browsers at our web proxy because it caches web pages.
Most of our customers prefer to host their web pages on our server. Customers with special requirements run their own web servers from their desktops. If traffic to their web site becomes considerable, they have the option of moving the data to a central server which has better network connectivity. However many of our customers are developing small, experimental CGI or Java applications and a personal web server suits their needs. In this case, they choose which server they prefer to install and run.
Our Discussion/Bulletin Board (``groupware'') service is based on the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) [RFC977], an open standard, so that NT as well as UNIX clients may access it. It is our pre-existing netnews server. Our netnews service is provided using InterNetNews (INN) [Salz] on a Sun Sparc Ultra with Sun On-line Disk Suite and enough disk space to store a month of news (except the ``adult'' stuff).