For your startup, what services do you use? I'm using Amazon AWS for hosting, Pivotal Tracker for project planning, GitHub, and a few others I can't think of right now.
What paid services do you find the most useful in running your startup?
I'm surprised at all the people still using Slicehost. They are good people, and run a nice service, but in terms of money, you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode:
I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.
Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:
Agreed. Their articles are a really great resource as well (and aren't Slicehost specific). They have a ton of step by step guides for OS setup, Apache, MySql, Postfix, etc...
you are leaving it on the table when compared to Linode
In my case, the "left on the table" amount is about 1/100th of my sales. From last week. That doesn't exactly justify me dropping everything and spending my freaking expensive engineering time figuring out how to migrate without causing breakage or downtime.
When my credit card expired, Linode deactivated my account and never responded to my emails after that. If I had data that I needed on that machine, I would've lost it forever.
They're cheap, so I still use them for personal projects, but personally, I'd never trust my business with them.
Wow. I just had the same situation with Slicehost. They notified me about the problem, said that there was a five day grace period, and that I could always contact them if I had any problems. They generally replied within the hour to all my e-mails.
I use Slicehost, after looking at Linode's pages these features seem to be missing:
Bandwidth is pooled between all of your slices.
Money is pooled -- if you pay a certain amount, you get the "annual discount", but then you can use that for paying for whichever slices each month. And you can bring slices up and down whenever you want to, and pay a prorated amount.
There's a nice API so you can automate a lot of your activities.
On the other hand, Linode does seem to be a bit cheaper on RAM and a lot cheaper on bandwidth.
Bandwidth at Linode is also pooled for Linodes withing the same datacenter (of which they have 4). You can also bring up any number of Linodes and bring them down whenever you want. You will be charged for the full month but if you bring them down, they will give you credit for the unused portion of the month (rate is per day). Linode also has an API for their DNS service but I haven't really used it so I won't comment much on it. In short, Linode is a pretty good deal.
We (Linode) announced a public beta of our new backup service in our NJ facility yesterday and hope to have it rolled out to all four locations shortly: http://tinyurl.com/db8tlf
We use Dropbox, Wufoo, CO2Stats, and Etherpad (which will soon be paid). The only one we have to pay for is CO2Stats, because they have to buy power certificates, which cost them money. But we'd pay for all of them if we had to.
Www.ycombinator.com is a machine at Pair Networks, and News is at The Planet. We use EasyDNS for domains.
We used to use Highrise (we may actually still be paying for it) but we abandoned it because it wasn't flexible enough.
Fetching URLs mentioned on Twitter. It scales great, but turns out the part where I save the results to a central MySQL DB does not. Surprised that you max out your InnoDB UPDATEs after only around two thousands per second. Will try memcachedb.
FPS provides a robust set of interface tools to the amazon payments system. It enables a number of payment models that other services don't offer such as, subscription, aggregate (i.e. micropayment), marketplace/3 party (i.e. user to user transactions with optional commission), and the prices are competitive. You can even do user to user transfers with no fees. They also offer fraud protection.
It is not trivial to implement in an application but does seem to be very concise for the features it provides. The con for this flexibility naturally is increased complexity. They do offer a 'Simple Pay' solution if you don't need the extra features, but I've not used that.
During development you can tie you application to the FPS 'sandbox' which simulates the complete user experience as well as virtual payments and fees so that you can see exactly how things will work in production from various points of view with out actually moving money around.
I needed subscriptions, so I could not use the other popular solutions (when the decision was made), and therefore can't compare. However, I refuse to use paypal because they put 100% of the risk on the account holder, while at the same time not disclosing information about the purchaser to allow for fraud investigation, this is flat out unacceptable.
I use AWS mostly for static content hosting (S3 + CloudFront). I plan to shift over to EC2 when I have enough users to warrant the expenses (Currently on a 256MB slice - $20/month).
Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, a VoIP provider for a 1-888 number to an asterisk machine (vitelity.net).
After that, it's just business class internet service and the electric company . . . I say screw all this hosting, cloud hosting, and bunches of paid web apps; in this day and age you should be able to install apache and set up whatever you need, and move to Rackspace or hire accounts if you are ever actually making money (which I'm not).
Most useful I would describe as 'wheels come off if we stop using'. Ours are:
- Quickbooks Online (backoffice/finance)
- Smartsheet (work management/collaboration/file sharing)
- Amazon AWS (hosting infrastructure)
Other services I subscribe to and find work well are:
- Zoomerang (online surveys)
- MyEmma (e-mail marketing)
- GoToMeeting (web conferencing)
- Jott (voice capture and transcription, integrated with Smartsheet)
All of those services provide things that I need, but don't want to spend time administering. In the case of The Planet they are providing the network, but I still maintain the servers. I am thinking about moving to Amazon once the contract is up.
From a non-webapp perspective, I pay for legal and accounting too. I have thought about paying for a personal assistant, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.
A merchant account is in the cards, though we don't know where yet (and haven't finished the process of incorporation, so can't get one yet).
At some point we might use Exceptional (I like the look of it, but I'm not a coder so I'm not making the decision of whether we need it or not) and if Get Satisfaction proves useful perhaps pay for a plan there. We'll see.
Maintaining your own repo is usually more work than most people realize. I prefer to outsource as much sysadmin as possible and stick to dev work, and source control is a cheap one to outsource.
With unfuddle you can even get a (small) free private repo.
In my experience, the setup cost is minimal, but maintenance _always_ takes longer than I expect. Restarting servers, opening the correct ports, updating w/ security patches, integrating w/ ticket management, etc.
One server per box is worth money to achieve. When you have a git server running on the same box as (say) your web server, you cannot reboot, upgrade, reinstall, power down, or power up one service without affecting the other. You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users. You can't develop on an EC2 instance that you spin up and down as needed because git needs to be more reliable than that.
I guess it might be okay to run git on my mail server. Except I don't have a mail server: That's outsourced. (Way too much trouble to run for oneself.) All I run for myself is local machines (not about to serve from those -- poor uptime, firewalls are a pain) and web/database servers, and I don't want the constraint of even having to remember that git is running on one of them. I want a git setup that is out of sight, out of mind, and far away from my bumbling sysadmin (a.k.a. "me").
And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.
I can see the problem if you're doing everything with EC2.
One point, however:
> You can't switch server hostnames or IPs without potentially affecting your git users.
Yes, you can. Computers should have:
* One or more IP addresses.
* A hostname that is attached to that computer, and only that computer, such as thor.example.com
* Hostnames that are attached to services on computers, such as git.example.com, mail.example.com, www.example.com, and so on. You can change these to point where they're needed, so as to not cause any interruptions or problems for your users.
> And we're haggling over the price of github, here. It's dirt cheap.
Sure, but I'm cheap, and for my setup, it's money I can save, and it just seems weird to pay for something that's so easy to set up.
Say your time is worth $80/hour, and you can get away with the $7/month github plan. Doing it yourself, if you spend more than ~5 minutes/month on admin, it's not worth it.
I'm not arguing any particular specifics here, just saying that any sysadmin work - user management, server management, code hosting, smtp server (ugh, that shit sucks) - always takes longer than I expect. If you're a great sysadmin, go for it. If not, outsource as much as you can afford.
I guess I have a different idea of what 'great sysadmin' means:-) Any competent hacker ought to be able to admin 1 or 2 unix boxes. It takes a great sysadmin to run hundreds of them.
Also, my point depends on an assumption that may not be true for everyone: that you have your own server that you run.
I am pretty sure what Micah means by "great sysadmin" is "already skilled enough at managing services X,Y,Z so that you can do them with 0% chance that a 5-min thing turns into a 2-hour or 8-hour thing".
I could manage all of that stuff directly, but I shouldn't because I don't do it all day long which means that either I'll a) do it wrong or b) have to do several hours of research to make sure I don't do it wrong or c) routine multi-hour interruptions when things break or d) combine a+b+c because that's what will happen in reality.
It's because of this that we outsource the following things that we could do ourselves:
* Email hosting (Tucows)
* DNS servers (Tucows)
* VoIP (Vonage)
* 800# (Onebox)
* External system monitoring (Pingdom)
* General server sysadmin (a friend of mine)
* StreamSend (Email Marketing - not that good, but dealing with RBL and email deliverability is worse)
* Payflow Pro (credit card gateway - BAD customers service o/w OK)
It costs some REAL money, but saves much more in opportunity costs, headache, etc. Plus our services improve as these companies improve offerings.
We only directly manage things that can save us TONS of money or are strategically important. Here's the list of those things:
* SugarCRM
* RT (bug tracking. was outsourced but too $$ so we moved in house)
* Internal system monitoring
* Hosting (we run our own systems since we have tons of custom dependencies)
Good list - and indeed, a lot of those things I would rank as something I'd be more likely to pay for before github. Others, like DNS, you can get good services for free (everydns) unless you really need something fancy.
FWIW, Tucows DNS service is free. I pay for the domain reg's and email. They used to charge for it, like $0.25/mo or something, but then it became free. Woot.
I had been hosting it myself (subversion), but when I added another developer I wanted it somewhere that I didn't have to manage and that kept security completely separate.
Github and Heroku (I'm hopeful they will start charging one of these days, because I think they are on to something good. And I'm very new to Rails so it works for me at least here in the beginning).
Ditto. I'm interested as well. I gather that existing customers can send a referral code that, when used, gives the referrer and the referee each a $25 credit (which negates the activation fee). Please be in touch if you're willing/able to refer me. Thanks.
we are an eCommerce biz so a bit diff:
bigresponse (email marketing)
MediaTemple
Adwords (off and on)
Facebook ads (now off no real interest in restarting)
Amazon Merchant Account
You only want to use it if you want a more robust payment then a 'buy now' button. In other words it's a lot to deal with if you only need that level of functionality. My app has a subscription model, and will be expanding out to a market at some point in the future. FPS handles all of those models. They also provide some good guarantees. Given some of the recent complaints about about google payments, and my own personal experiences with paypal I'm beginning to value these guarantees very highly.
However, my system is not fully implemented and deployed (hence no link yet), so I'm not ready to provide a full endorsement. I can only say that the experience so far on the development side has been very good, and the sandbox makes extensive testing before deployment very easy.
I will report back when I've deployed the system in production.
http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode
I was with SH myself, and before I wrote that article, I dropped them an email asking about the 64 vs 32 bit thing, and was simply informed that they have no plans for 32 bit, so I went ahead and switched, then wrote my article and have been happy since. I sincerely hope the SH guys will get competitive again, at which point I'll gladly update my article.
Also, something that Linode was missing for a while was backups. They're rolling them out now:
http://blog.linode.com/2009/04/03/backup-service-enters-beta...