Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Verisign, Network Solutions-- all are big names on the Internet. But unfortunately, all of their products are among the most expensive in the industry, too.

But as we have learned, the services these companies' software provides can also be provided, often much better, by free software. Linux is the now well-known challenger to the dominance of Microsoft Windows. MySQL and PostgreSQL are fast and robust alternatives to the multi-thousand dollar database systems sold by Oracle. All of these alternative solutions are free or very low cost alternatives to their very expensive competition. Most function as well or better than the more expensive product. So why do people still buy from the big guys? Easy... the big name.

Netmar doesn't believe in that. We sell services here, not big names. The big name is generally representative of some high-level of quality, service, or reliability. But when you can match or exceed all of those things for LESS, then there's no reason left to spend extra on the name.

We've been a big fan of open source software from the moment we started business.  For one thing, there was no such thing as a closed-source web server at the time (NCSA's httpd was pretty much the only game in town).  Even though we were originally based on Solaris with Sun hardware, we quickly grew to use and appreciate a whole slew of open source programs, and today, almost everything we run is open source.

So, why open source? The answer is simple.  Because it works. Period.  We've been using open source applications from the very beginning, and we've never been disappointed.