Ask HN: What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What Paid Services Do You Use For Your Startup?

64 pointsquellhorst93 comments

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?

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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:

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...

I switched to Linode after reading your blog post. Also, Slicehost had some serious downtime last December.

The "community" section of the Slicehost website is really exceptional though. Insanely great.

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...

http://articles.slicehost.com/

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.

Perhaps it's not prominent on the site, but:

Bandwidth is pooled between all of your nodes (and it doesn't matter which data center you place them in).

We offer prepayment discounts: 10% for 12 months and 15% for 24 months. We also prorate all billing to the day (you only pay for what you use).

There is an API for the DNS Manager, with more to come.

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.

Just another data point.

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.

not sure how long ago that was, but I'd be happy to look into it. service at linode.com

So do you (now) have a standard grace period when a credit card payment fails?

Yes, along with a few notifications via e-mail.

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.

I've use both Linode (personal) and Slicehost (picwing). AFAIK, Linode still does not have automatic backups, which is really simple on Slicehost.

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.

EngineYard (hosting)

Fogbugz (bug tracking)

Github (scm... paying but included with EY)

NewRelic (perf monitoring... paying but included with EY)

Protx (payment gateway. Awful customer service, don't recommend them)

Easyspeedy (test server that we should get rid of, really)

I'll add GetSatisfaction to the list after all the bashing they've received this week.

We (and our users) get satisfaction from them...

Question for AWS users: What are you running on AWS? (web, DB, static content, ...)

Elastic IP + EC2 + Elastic Block for hosting. S3 for backups. I also make judicious use of Mechanical Turk for usability testing.

I also use Google apps for my domain for email hosting (free). I also use Woopra's real time analytics (free).

I have an online store that I'm paying Yahoo Merchant Solutions for. I also pay for an extra line with Vonage for my business line. ($10 a month).

I've used Google Adwords for advertising occasionally.

S3 for data backups and file storage. CloudFront as a CDN. A few EC2 instances for data processing and Elastic IPs for them.

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.

Different setup for different projects. Latest was all AWS: EC2 servers pushing out most static content to S3.

Also use EC2 for test and staging servers as then we only need them up for the actual test or staging period.

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).

I'm using S3/cloudfront for assets, user data and backups, EC2 and elastic IPs, SQS, and FPS for payment processing. Love it.

To the question I also pay for authsmtp, and will probably be using the pay level of "New Relic" as well soon, for rails profiling.

Pros and cons of FPS?

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 second the request for pros and cons of FPS

S3 for data backups, storage. Bunch of EC2 instances with EBS for crunching data and running web crawler.

Slicehost, AWS, Pingdom (downtime alerts).

Lots of freebies too, though.

Github, Lighthouse, Google Apps, Pingdom. That's all I can really think of at the moment. Hosting is situated firmly on the ground, so no AWS for now.

Google (Docs, Site, Mail), Skype (Communication), Unfuddle (Repository), AWS (Runtime), drop.io (File exchange), Vimeo (Video), Scribd (Docs)

The services side of our business: highrise, basecamp, glance, blinksale

The internal side: serverbeach, github, campfire

I think they're all great, so it's easier to say what we would switch away from.

We would switch from serverbeach to slicehost if we were scaling faster.

We would switch from highrise to a different CRM if it was easier to write custom reports.

Rank ordered by amount spent:

AdWords (I spend more than everything else on this list, doubled.)

SwiftCD (outsourced CD fulfillment)

Paypal / Google Checkout

Slicehost

Microsoft AdCenter

CrazyEgg

Clicky (getclicky.com)

Slicehost, CampaignMonitor, Wufoo, AWS (just for S3 hosting of downloads)

Hosting: Rackspace, EngineYard, Slicehost SCM: GitHub (included with EY) Project Management: Basecamp Storage: AWS S3 Merchant: PayPal and BrainTree VoiceMail: GotVMail Email: CampaignMonitor

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).

Github, LightHouse, The Planet

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.

Skype, Central Desktop, Silicon Ridge (web hosting), Webex Office (Calendar & Contacts), 123SignUp, Spellr, Dabbleboard, LinkedIn, iContact, Google Adwords,

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)

GitHub, Linode, AWS.

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.

By the way, why do you use github when you could host your sources yourself ?

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.

I've regularly criticized git for being good, but overhyped and not quite ready for prime time.

However, it is dirt simple to set up a git repository for use by a few people on a box where they have accounts anyway.

   cd /var/local/
   mkdir myapp
   ... appropriate permissions, add a few files ...
   git init

And you're done. Granted, you can do fancier things, but we're talking about startups with just a few people here, right?

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.

Just my $0.02

* Restarting servers? If you're doing something really basic, it's just sshd.

* Since you connect to the server anyway, that one's open.

* Security patches is a regular apt-get update and not much more.

* Ticket management... ok, that's an extra, but github still doesn't have a ticket tracking system, does 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.

nail on the head

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.

But if it's a labour of love? Priceless...

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.

I'd add gliffy (for diagrams), balsamiq (for mockups) and onebox (for phone service) to the list...

@massify we use:

- Slicehost (some hosting)

- Datapipe (hosting)

- EC2 (Document/media conversion)

- S3 (Storage)

- Panther Express (CDN)

- PBWiki

- PivotalTracker

- Protoshare

- DNSMadeEasy

- Hosted MS Exchange

- JIRA/Fisheye/Crucible

AWS for application hosting and storage. Paypal for payment processing (if that counts).

github

Current (and all recommended): GitHub AWS (S3, EC2, ...) Pivotal Tracker Dropbox

Migrating away from: Slicehost (redundant with AWS) Lighthouse (redundant with Pivotal Tracker)

Already migrated away from: Basecamp

We're using

Slicehost (Hosting) AWS (Storage) Authorize.net (Recurring Billing) Bank of America (Banking)

and we're currently looking into paying for an 800 number...anyone have any suggestions for this?

GotVMail is a good value.

This looks good. Do you have an account with them and/or want to refer me? I think we can both save some money. Shoot me an email

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.

No problem guys... this should work out well for each of us. I'll send an email with my info.

EDIT: Scratch that. Looks like I'll need your email addresses to refer you. You'll each get a $25 credit and I'll net $20 total. Not bad.

My address is brian at firstblogmedia dot com. Drop me a line ASAP.

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).

linode, AWS(s3,cloudfront), getclicky

Just curious, why don't you use Google Analytics?

What services do you pay for that are non-technical? Lawyers, Accountants, Copywriters, Consultants of various stripes? Anything recurring?

We use the following paid services: Dropbox, Wufoo, Github, Slicehost, Skype, Google Apps, Uservoice, Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker

Unfuddle.com for subversion hosting, wiki, and bug tracking. Will be using AWS in the near future once some code gets written.

Free version of most of the paid apps work just find for us. Dropbox, getsatisfaction, basecamp.

We pay for slicehost.

Basecamp, Highrise, Harvest, Slicehost, GitHub, Paypal Merchant Account - that's about all for now.

I pay to monitor my credit report.

You asked for PAID services, not just any SaaS.

webfaction, AWS (ec2, sqs, s3), paypal

Paying for GitHub, AWS (Ec2, SimpleDB, S3), LightHouse, Vonage, DreamHost.

Engine Yard, New Relic, GitHub, Lighthouse.

Typical Rails shop stuff, :)

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

Wordpress, Rackspace, Serverbeach, Onebox, Speakeasy Hosted VOIP

Dropbox, Mantis, and git, the latter being hosted on Slicehost.

Serverbeach, JungleDisk/S3, MerchantPlus, CampaignMonitor

Omniture for metrics, ExactTarget for email campaigns.

Used to pay for basecamp. Then switched to Dropbox.

Slicehost, trying out Basecamp at the moment.

Freshbooks, Jotform, CampaignMonitor, Paypal

GoDaddy, BrainTree Financial, Quickbooks

Am I the only one here using AWS-FPS?

What're your thoughts on FPS? Can you post a link to one of your sites using it? Thanks

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.

The Planet, Ringcentral, Google Apps

Freshbooks for invoicing, etc.

Google Apps, Slicehost

github.com speedyrails(rails VPS)

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