Cartika is pleased to announce that QuickSilk – an enterprise-level, subscription-based CMS  and hosting platform designed for simplicity – has chosen us as their official host for its SaaS offering. By tapping into our years of experience as a host, we’ve set QuickSilk up with a powerful, reliable, and affordable cloud platform that it can use to deliver QuikSilk to their clients. Full redundancy ensures downtime is negligible, and automatic backup through Bacula4 allows them to recover from even the most catastrophic bugs But enough about us – let’s talk a little bit about them. The popular choice isn’t always the best one. Take WordPress, for example. Although it’s one of the most powerful and versatile content management systems in the world – although it runs around 20% of the world’s websites – that doesn’t mean it’s the right option for every business. As a content management system, it definitely isn’t without its problems. Perhaps the most significant drawback is the vulnerability of the platform. Although WordPress core is one of the more secure open source applications on the web; to gain access to advanced functionality you’ll generally either need to code your own PHP apps or download a plugin. Unfortunately, as you’ve certainly noticed from the news, those plugins more often than not tend to be a cornucopia of security threats – the more plugins you install, the likelier it is that your installation will be exposed. There are other issues as well, of course. Configuration of anything beyond the basics tends to be a headache, documentation is often inconsistent, and out-of-the-box, it’s actually kind of bland. QuickSilk doesn’t have any of those problems. Established back in 2001 by Garry Brownrigg, QuickSilk was originally a rather unassuming web development and services company  by the name of SohoPortal. The majority of its clients at the time were small companies and non-profits. In 2012, however, the company renamed itself, launched the initial version of it QuickSilk platform and landed some very notable clients. The actual story stretches back a bit farther, however. Frustrated with the traditional web software platforms, the short version is that Brownrigg and his colleagues were looking for a web framework to help them manage their web development  business. Unfortunately, none of the options they found suited their needs – so eventually, they coded their own. Thus was born the QuickSilk CMS. QuickSilk’s got two big draws compared to other content management systems on the market. First, it’s extremely simple to use – you can put together a professional-looking enterprise website in a matter of hours, and consolidate all of your marketing and social media efforts there with relative ease. It’s fully managed, meaning updates are taken care of by QuickSilk’s staff – all you need to do is focus on maintaining your website. Second, because the platform’s proprietary, it’s not subject to the same security risks as many open source content management systems. That also allows QuickSilk’s staff to provide clients with fast, direct support – which definitely beats spending several hours poring over documentation. Factor in the relatively low cost of subscription, and QuickSilk’s a compelling choice if you’re looking for an alternative to WordPress – or any other content management system, for that matter. We’re happy to have them as a partner, and we look forward to doing business with them in the future.