HN Explorer

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

64 points by quellhorst ↗ HN
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?

98 comments

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cperciva
AWS for application hosting and storage. Paypal for payment processing (if that counts).
jbrun
Basecamp, Highrise, Harvest, Slicehost, GitHub, Paypal Merchant Account - that's about all for now.
jaxn
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.

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

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

davidw
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?
MicahWedemeyer
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

davidw
* 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?

MicahWedemeyer
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.
davidw
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.

apinstein
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)

davidw
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.
apinstein
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.
mechanical_fish
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.

davidw
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.

bodhi
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...

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jaxn
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.
sgoraya
The Planet, Ringcentral, Google Apps
stuff4ben
Unfuddle.com for subversion hosting, wiki, and bug tracking. Will be using AWS in the near future once some code gets written.
dangrover
Slicehost, CampaignMonitor, Wufoo, AWS (just for S3 hosting of downloads)
Mistone
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
bbuffone
Google (Docs, Site, Mail), Skype (Communication), Unfuddle (Repository), AWS (Runtime), drop.io (File exchange), Vimeo (Video), Scribd (Docs)
lecha
You asked for PAID services, not just any SaaS.

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

pierrefar
Slicehost, AWS, Pingdom (downtime alerts).

Lots of freebies too, though.

tdavis
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.
jlees
Slicehost, trying out Basecamp at the moment.
hedgehog
Question for AWS users: What are you running on AWS? (web, DB, static content, ...)
iamelgringo
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.

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

rmanocha
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).
fireteller
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.

wensing
Pros and cons of FPS?
fireteller
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.

Derrek
I second the request for pros and cons of FPS
ible
S3 for data backups, storage. Bunch of EC2 instances with EBS for crunching data and running web crawler.
pmikal
Wordpress, Rackspace, Serverbeach, Onebox, Speakeasy Hosted VOIP
hikari17
I'd add gliffy (for diagrams), balsamiq (for mockups) and onebox (for phone service) to the list...
kbrower
linode, AWS(s3,cloudfront), getclicky
paraschopra
Just curious, why don't you use Google Analytics?
johns
Serverbeach, JungleDisk/S3, MerchantPlus, CampaignMonitor
skmurphy
Skype, Central Desktop, Silicon Ridge (web hosting), Webex Office (Calendar & Contacts), 123SignUp, Spellr, Dabbleboard, LinkedIn, iContact, Google Adwords,
RobGR
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).

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

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

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

We pay for slicehost.