Webmaint and Interchange: Our Commitment

History

At Webmaint we have been working with Interchange since the Minivend 3 days in 1999. We have seen the product progress to Minivend 4, and then with the acquisition by Akopia a change in name to Interchange. With this came the integration of Akopia's Tallyman ecommerce product and the strengthening of the core development team.

The acquisition of Akopia by Red Hat in January 2001 accelerated the development of Interchange, and further vidicated Webmaint's adoption and continued support of the product. It became far easier to introduce Interchange as the preferred development platform to a client (and without having to explain that Minivend isn't really 'mini' at all).

In June 2002, Mike Heins, the original author of Minivend and core developer to this day, announced the formation of the Interchange Development Group (ICDEVGROUP). This is a group of people committed to the future of Interchange as a development platform, and able to support the further development of the application where Red Hat were unable. Webmaint is represented in this core group of developers.

Hosting

When we started developing in Minivend, we looked at potential hosting providers here in the UK. We could find none. We heard plenty of stories about hosts banning the installation of Minivend, or where people had managed to get it installed, another server process was killing it due to its memory requirements. In 1999 we chose to set up dedicated Minivend hosting in order to guarantee our clients a quality service. We have since upgraded this through Minivend 4, to Interchange, and have migrated customer applications in order to take advantage of the new features.

Our Commitment

Interchange has specific requirements - it can be both processor and memory hungry. Webmaint application servers are sized with this in mind, and the experience we have gained over the years. We have invested in infrastructure so that your websites remain online, and perform at acceptable speed.

We are not just another host who tries to add value to their hosting package by bundling free software which they are not able to support. Over the years we have demonstrated our knowledge of Interchange in development, support and hosting; we see Interchange as far more than just a shopping cart and are committed to its future. We run Interchange 5.3.x, 5.4.x and a CVS updated 5.5.x for development, we also contribute to the Interchange users mailing list, the Interchange core development team, bug submissions and documentation.

Through continual investment, we aim to be the best UK provider of Interchange application hosting, now and in the future.

Get Started

We want you to benefit from this excellent software. We want you to do so from stable foundations which will support you through your development cycles, into production and as your business grows. To help you on your way, our Interchange hosting comes with the 'foundation' template catalogue already set up including a MySQL database. Additionally, for UK customers it can be supplied ready-configured into Pounds Sterling as home currency, and set up with Euros as an alternative. This head start gives you more time to do the fun stuff!