As part of #NGD10 we’ve decided to do something that we’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the tools that we use everyday. These are the tools, apps and technology that we rely on to make sure to keep our team in sync, and therefore to make our service as good as possible.

We have always strived to have the best customer support experience in the usenet world, and Zendesk has been a key to making that possible. We experimented with a few different helpdesk solutions in our early years, but moved to Zendesk as soon as it became available back in 2007/2008 and haven’t looked back. Using Zendesk our team can handle support requests more efficiently than was ever possible with previous helpdesk solutions.

Like almost everyone we have settled on WordPress as our blogging platform. It’s as well-made as it is ubiquitous. Before WordPress we didn’t consider blogging… that’s how good WordPress is.

Basecamp is the world’s best project management software. We use it to manage all aspects of our company, from to-do lists to the many projects that we have going at any given time. Over the last couple of years they have added high-quality mobile apps as well, which helps the team on the go.

We have used Rackspace for our hosting for the last 5 years or so. Once cloud hosting became readily available we immediately went in that direction instead of relying on dedicated servers. We’ve found that Rackspace has fantastic support as well, which has come in handy many times.

At our core we are a web development company. Development is what we do and it’s what we love to do. We started out back in the early 2000’s using PHP as our language of choice. Over time other languages, like Ruby, have become more popular choices for web dev, but we’ve been able to stick with PHP thanks to the awesome PHP framework CakePHP. CakePHP gives PHP the power and ease of use that newer languages have without having to rewrite our entire codebase.

 #NGD10 Rolls On

Just a reminder that #NGD10 is still going on through the rest of June. We’ve giving away 5 free unlimited accounts for 1 year each Friday, including this Friday, June 27. Just email [email protected] with subject #NGD10 to enter. Be sure to include your name.