The best service providers for startups | Hacker News Reader

The best service providers for startups

blog.robwebb2k.com

21 pointsrwebb13 comments

Decent list. I'd include:

Google's GrandCentral (for phone #) 37Signals' Campfire (for chatting... in office or not) ThePlanet (dedicated servers)

I'd put SoftLayer on par with ThePlanet. It was founded by former ThePlanet execs and I've had a great experience with them.

Does anyone else have experience with BrainTree? They look good and seem to offer a very robust API (which would make -my- life a heckuva lot easier), but my boss is still leaning towards PayPal due to brand/stability.

Also, they talk a lot about "up-front pricing," yet I can't seem to find any information about pricing and fee's on their website. What gives?

shoot them an email to get pricing. they are massively more flexible than paypal, no branding on your site, and cheaper. seriously.

The amount of fraudulent transactions going through PayPal and then requiring reversing is absolutely STAGGERING.

In our case the fraud rate got close to 50%. Whatever anti-fraud provisions they have in place, they are not effective. Fortunately almost all fraudulent transactions originated from just one country, so it was relatively easy to deny paid services based on the user's location.

@dmpayton - I work for Braintree and the company does not publish prices because they depend a lot on many variables including the business type, credit card volume, type of credit cards that are most commonly accepted (e.g. debit, credit, rewards, business to business, international, etc.) and other variables. There is no one size fits all pricing model that applies to all businesses.

Braintree practices full disclosure pricing with no hidden fees which is rare in this industry. Here's a blog post that describe where credit card fees come from if you're interested in learning more: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/where-do-credi...

If that were the reason, couldn't you simply publish a web form where we can enter in all those variables and get an idea of the price? I suspect that you would already be using such a tool internally.

Mediatemple -- the author of this piece says "no, bad!" I've heard very good things from others about MT. Is there a consensus here on the quality/price ratio of (mt)'s services?

thanks for the responses. i put up a long one 2x earlier but the site was all jacked up. in short i think ringcental has more corporate type options than GC, i haven't been psyched with 37 signals stuff (although it looks sweet!) but will check out campfire as well as theplanet (and lots of people psyched on slicehost - i'll check that too).

I like Campfire a lot, because it's simple and gets the job done. I can't recommend Basecamp and other 37Signals products, because they've just never been right for me and I don't have enough experience with them. ThePlanet, on the other hand, has been my dedicated server host since 2004 and has always been superb.

I'll vouch for Campfire also. It's relatively easy to hook notifications into it so that commits, test failures, and bug reports show up. In my last two companies we've ended up with then dynamic of "if it doesn't notify campfire, it didn't happen."

I use Highrise also for CRM. If it's just one or two of you then it's probably the only CRM out there that's simple enough to get into your workflow. If you're managing a salesforce then you probably want something different. But for just remembering who my clients are and when I need to contact them, it's amazing.

I'd also include slicehost for hosting...cheap, great documentation , and you can install many linux distros

we use GoToMeeting at work for giving demos and telecons

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