HN Explorer

Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2010 edition

240 points by joshu ↗ HN
When I first started delicious, we had to host most of the services ourselves. CVS, mail, mailing lists, etc etc etc.

These days, lots of that stuff is available as SaaS. What are the tools and services people use instead of hosting their own?

(I'm not talking about actual production services like EC2 and Heroku and whatnot. We can go over this in another thread.)

94 comments

[ 99.7 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] thread
frisco
Edit: now that I think about it, this is a perfect use-case for Quora:

http://www.quora.com/What-SaaS-products-are-on-the-startups-...

dotBen
What do people think of this - it feels like this is sort of siphoning off legitimate conversation for HN to a somewhat-rival community.

(I'm sure many of us use both Quora and HN, but there is definitely overlap like this)

issaco
Quora - no external hyperlinks - HN wins.
robryan
Hacker News is bad at a persistent conversation of this type though, it will drop off the front page in a day and no one will add to it further. Something like this benefits from longer conversation though as it is a day to day and ever changing discussion.
mechanical_fish
So we'll do it again next year. It works for every other topic.

If the problem with a point-in-time conversation of this kind is that it goes stale, the problem with wiki-style "persistent conversations" is that they also go stale, only piecemeal, like Swiss cheese. You visit the wiki and have no idea which bits are new, and which are old, and whether or not two things that happen to be next to each other were written in the same year or with any reference to each other.

If the wiki were periodically edited, in toto, by someone who cared, this problem could be avoided. But most are not.

People are happy to have the same conversations again, only different. Conversing on HN is not drudgery to be automated away. We like rituals. We like the classics. And new people like going through the classic exercises that their predecessors did.

ktsmith
There's also a number of HN people that wouldn't be able to participate due to not having Facebook or Twitter accounts and thus being unable to have a Quora account.
vdm
++. No way in hell I am letting Quora know who all my friends are, without first checking out the site and building trust. OpenID (like stackoverflow) or GTFO.
ekidd
Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ ) -> Tracking feature backlog, release planning.
santry
Am I the only one who finds Pivotal Tracker's UX horrible to the point of being unusable?

I worked with a team that insisted on Pivotal Tracker and aside from its crashing my Fluid SSB every half hour or so, the text areas were way to small to type in comfortably. I found myself having to write the story in a text editor then pasting it in to PT. With that columnar layout, it just seemed like everything was cramped into spaces that were just way too small. Plus it doesn't track the history of a story. If it was assigned to Joe, then Larry, then Tom, there's no history of that chain of ownership.

davewasthere
Are we using the same Pivotal Tracker? :-)

I love the UI. It's got just what you need for an agile project - similar to 37signals design philosophy of less is less.

History is most definitely tracked - and is incredibly granular. Click on any story, then the View History button. Every change is recorded there.

Why fluid crashes? Well - I doubt it's Pivotal's fault as such. I've used Chrome, Firefox, Opera on it without issue. Clients use IE and apart from when they were using IE6 (support wasn't brilliant - but then again that browser is the bane of my life) they seem to get along with Pivotal just fine.

So it might possibly be just you. I definitely prefer pivotal to JIRA - but you may get better mileage?

joshu
I'll roll up all the answers into a spreadsheet or table soon.
frisco
Not into Quora? As several people answer it opens up a community-editable answer summary to bring them all together.
joshu
Shrug. Harder to organize. Maybe when it's done?
dotBen
Isn't Quora more about asking a specific question with a more specific obtainable answer?

Ie the open question here is "what tools are people using?" where as on Quora it would have to be "what are the best tools to use"... not sure they're exactly the same.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
joshu
Other threads I want to do:

- web-includable services that integrate into a web page

- production services (aws heroku etc.)

dotBen
upvoted, definitely would like to see this.

I think it would be interesting to go one further and (if it's appropriate for HN) to have one thread per vertical with discussion on different vendors and solution providers.

An example would be email campaign management providers come to mind (Mail Chimp vs Aweber vs Constant Contact vs others). I'm not really interested in a blog post from a single person but what the HN crowd think having used these tools in anger out there.

SkyMarshal
Would love to see the HN hive mind take on both, fire away.
callmeed
I've used GitHub and Unfuddle for source code. Both are great.

SendGrid for email delivery from my apps.

Google Apps for email on our domains.

S3 to host images/videos (we deal with a lot of them).

I've tried just about every mailing list service there is. I haven't "fell in love" with any of them but MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are my favorites.

Of course, there are now several recurring billing services. I've tried a few and have mixed feelings. Real slow response on support requests from a couple–which IMO is bad for a company that touches your money.

For customer support tickets, we had a home-built rails app but are currently transitioning to ZenDesk. Tender Support is another option.

endtime
Google Apps is the big one for us - especially mail and calendars. I run Redmine off Ubuntu Server inside VirtualBox...can't think of anything else we might be using. It is tempting to switch to Chargify but we're still on Auth.net for the time being.
japherwocky
Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?
endtime
What does it being ruby have to do with anything? I run it in VB because I don't have a spare machine for it. My desktop runs Windows 7, with a CentOS VM for dev work and a Ubuntu Server BM for gitosis and Redmine.
jblomo
I've had good experience with DNSMadeEasy.com. We actually kept DNS/bind configs in version control and used XFR to let DNSMadeEasy slurp them up.

Jim

gleb
Acunote ( http://www.acunote.com ) - project management, wiki, issue tracking, scrum software

Tarsnap ( http://www.tarsnap.com ) - offsite backup

DnsMadeEasy ( http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com ) - DNS

TrustCommerce ( http://www.trustcommerce.com ) - CC gateway

Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/apps ) - email

AuthorityLabs ( http://authoritylabs.com ) - SEO rank monitoring

GitHub ( http://github.com ) - OSS projects vss

shadytrees
Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.
redcap
Can you comment on your ability to successfully restore from backup?

I know of organisations that diligently back up their data, but fail to regularly check that they can restore from backups.

wwortiz
I've restored a couple times and done some tests, the transfer speed seemed a little slow but I don't know if it was on tarsnaps end or mine.

The server that I've done and tested restores for is only about 1.5 gb of information/configs.

tlack
The one time I had a huge failure and needed to restore I found Tarsnap amazingly slow. Between that and the overly complicated pricing I'm going to consider something else going forward.
mieses
Tarsnap costs 2-3x more than Amazon S3, and S3 is already several times more expensive than it should be. What is the advantage of Tarsnap over S3 and one of its many clients?
merijnv
Tarsnap also does encryption and compression. Now you might be able to implement something like that better then cperciva, but I know I sure as hell am not capable of implementing any system as secure as reliable as him. Does this knowledge cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on you.
barrkel
As does CrashPlan, and deduplication too, and it's cheaper than S3. It also runs on Solaris, Windows, etc., using file system monitoring to pick up changes.
jasondavies
JungleDisk does encryption and you only have to pay for S3 usage after the one-off license fee.
streety
Is that offer still available? I was under the impression that any new subscribers had to pay a monthly fee and it had been that way for a year or more.
quellhorst
I'm using duplicity with s3 instead.
streety
One point which rarely gets mentioned is that to use S3 you need to have the access codes on the server. So theoretically a malicious individual could break into your server and delete all your files on that box and then wipe all the files on S3.

Tarsnap enables you to separate out the ability to write/read/delete. So a compromised box could at worst be used to inflate your tarsnap bill but not to wipe out all your backups.

pbourke
S3/AWS multi-factor authentication, in combination with bucket versioning, ensures that if you can keep a redundant offsite record of your key and version information, you can always retrieve your data. An attacker requires your key fob to permanently delete an item. Of course, you'll need to physically secure your key fob.

http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/

streety
It has been a while since I looked at S3 and didn't spot multi-factor authentication at the time. At only $13for the fob it seems like an interesting alternative.

Thanks for the follow-up.

mleonhard
http://www.restbackup.com/ also provides protection from deletion. Rest Backup has an HTTP REST API so you can do backup & restore with curl.

I'm launching the Rest Backup beta next week.

andrewf
GitHub isn't just for OSS (you'll have to pay though)
jasonlbaptiste
Josh, check out Cloudomatic.com . We catalog most of the SaaS apps there. Not organized by what companies are using, but should give you a good idea of all the tools out there (way more than you think).
joshu
I kinda want to limit it to stuff in wide usage.
megamark16
Not to mention that it's nice to see what everyone within the HN network are using. I respect you guys and what you use and why.
mpakes
CloudKick ( http://cloudkick.com ) - Configurable server monitoring with SMS alerts. Love this service.

CoTweet ( http://cotweet.com ) - Shared Twitter account management. Great for support and guerrilla marketing.

Uservoice ( http://uservoice.com ) - User feedback and support management.

Dropbox ( http://dropbox.com ) - File sharing - we share the business dropbox with our individual dropboxes to share files.

Droplr ( http://droplr.com ) - Screenshot capture and sharing. Also allows for file sharing.

As mentioned by others:

GitHub ( http://github.com ) - VCS

Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a ) - Email and documents.

Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com ) - Project management and issue tracking.

Wordpress ( http://wordpress.com ) - Blog.

These are very specific to Rails, but extremely useful:

New Relic RPM ( http://newrelic.com ) - Deeply integrated Ruby on Rails app monitoring and performance measurement. Immensely helpful for troubleshooting and analysis, including slow query detection/explanation, etc.

Hoptoad ( http://www.hoptoadapp.com ) - Rails exception monitoring and alerting.

presto8
For backup, I've been quite pleased with CrashPlan.
SudarshanP
http://www.trada.com/ Crowdsourced SEM
aymeric
I tried it but it wasn't self-serve. Someone had to contact me and ask me a few questions. I didn't like that.

Is it still like that? Do you have a minimum budget to spend?

pacemkr
SendGrid - transactional and mass email

PivotalTracker - daily todo

FogBugz - customer support via email

gubatron
macosx | ubuntu

emacs, eclipse

version control tool of your choice (mercurial | git | svn)

python, bash, java.

a brain.