Operating System
Being an UNIX geek, it'd be impossible to serve this website on something other than an UNIX-type operating system. My actual server hardware is an IA-32 dual processor and that leaves a wide range of operating systems to choose from. I chose Linux because of its availability, flexilibity and very active development. Also Linux distributions tend to be easier to administrate (although less powerful than a Sun Solaris for example) than BSDs and such.
Gentoo Linux is running on the host hardware. This is a community based Linux distribution created from the idea of porting the FreeBSD port collection to Linux. Extremelly flexible and yet easy to maintain, Gentoo Linux is very well suited for server environments when companies and administrators are not afraid of community development and open source.
Most of its flexibility derives from the fact that software packages are installed from sources instead of being distributed in binary form. This allows for easy costumization of each package through the "USE flags" and easy installation through the portage database. The portage ebuilds provide automated fetching, patching, configuration, compilation, installation and portage database registration. Dependency management is done by portage and never fails.
Being a (heavily) dynamic website, it is written in PHP, backed by a MySQL database and served by the Apache webserver software.
Scripting support
PHP was specially written to suit web development with dynamic content. It is extremely powerful, very flexible and 100% open-source, distributed under their own PHP license.
Database Engine
Non-static websites need to keep information somewhere quicly and easily accessed either for website readers or for owners to upload content via some sort of backend. MySQL is a multi-version and multi-licensed very fast and robust database engine. MySQL Community Edition suits the open-source community by being distributed under the GPL license and by being extremely flexible both on very small personal installations and on huge-workload company servers. According to the MySQL website "MySQL Community Edition is the world's most popular open source database with over 6 million users".
Web Server
Providing the last gateway between the website server and the reader's browser, Apache does its job like no other webserver. It has always been unix based and distributed under the GPL-compatible Apache License. According to the netcraft web server survey nearly 70% of all online websites are being served by apache and it occupies the first position in the market share since about March/1996.
