"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other." - Oscar Ameringer
It takes a surprising amount of technology to operate HackThisSite efficiently with as much uptime and availability as possible. This page details a question commonly asked of us: "What runs HackThisSite?"
The HackThisSite Staff has recently started blogging its behind-the-scenes activities, including the 'Engine Room' series, following the backend infrastructure that runs all of HackThisSite.
HackThisSite operates a variety of systems to host all of our services. Included in this list are both owned physical machinery and miscellaneous virtualized or shared resources.
Physical Hardware
HackThisSite currently owns and operates a colocated 4U server in Denver, Colorado, USA. It has the following specifications:
4x Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8346 HE, 32GB RAM, all systems local- and offsite-redundant
Due to the fact that we require high-availability across multiple geographical locations, we also utilize a series of dedicated, virtualized, and shell servers around the world. They are throughout various locations in the
United States and other outside nations including Sweden and Germany. This allows us to ensure that, through various data protections maneuvers, HackThisSite is spread worldwide.
Software
To provide all the services we do, HackThisSite utilizes a very large assortment of software, some made in-house, but mostly heavily customized and configured free and open source software.
Software We Develop
The code that runs the entire main HackThisSite website, from the main landing page to the missions themself, are all developed by a team of skilled developers. The only exception to this are the forums, which use phpBB.
Software We Use
While this list is nowhere near comprehensive, these are some of the software that we use the most:
HackThisSite is the collective work of the HackThisSite staff, licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
We ask that you inform us upon sharing or distributing.