I've been thinking about the idea that most startups/companies are generally the same -- at some point, they all have to deal with issues like billing, accounting, provisioning, newsletter/email delivery, banking, IT, etc.<p>What tools/services do you currently use? If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
We're a Microsoft shop, so the sweet spot for us is a small number of fast servers. We pay for tools and server licenses, but surprisingly less than you might expect.<p>Hardware: Half a cage at a colo with one fast box for web/db server, and a few cheap pizza boxes for build server and misc. This used to be two boxes in a garage behind a business DSL until Twiddla went big.<p>Content storage & delivery: S3/Cloudfront<p>Heavy lifting: EC2. We spin up a half dozen boxes each night for a few hours of processing for S3stat.<p>Email: Google Apps (they're terrible, but free and functional)<p>Tools: MSDN + EmpowerISV = $400 for all the dev tools for the shop. Small Business Server for the boxes in the cage. ReSharper, CodeSmith & RedGate's SQL stuff are actually the biggest per dev cost, but they make life so much better that they're worth it.<p>All in, it works out to about $500/month to keep up and running. Total, across all our sites (and there are quite a few). The colo is expensive, but it's so nice. Even with the cloud stuff where it is today, I'd still put a box in a datacenter if I had it to do over again.
Business: Social games for gamers (<a href="http://www.ea2d.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ea2d.com</a>)<p>Languages: Java backend, AS3 frontend, Python + Ruby misc<p>Note that we're very new (and hiring!), so much of this is still being built out.<p>Software lifecycle: git for SCM (GitHub as central repo); ant for builds; ivy for dependency management; Bamboo for build automation; Crucible for code review; JIRA for issue tracking; Greenhopper for sprint planning; Vagrant for containerized development environments<p>Systems infrastructure: AWS (EC2 w/ELB+ASG and S3 for now, more services to come); nginx-fronted Tomcat for JVM; Cassandra for persistent DB; chef for configuration management (currently chef-solo, but
evaluating Opscode Platform); PoolParty+Fabric for one-click deploy server fleets; Nagios + Pingdom for monitoring; Mixpanel + Kontagent for analytics; Dynect (likely) for DNS, possibly for GSLB; Akamai (likely) for CDN, possibly for GSLB<p>Misc: PagerDuty for on-call stuff; Google Apps for email, shared docs, etc; Confluence for wiki; OpenFire (Jabber) for chat
* Code Management/Bug tracking: <a href="http://unfuddle.com" rel="nofollow">http://unfuddle.com</a> - I love these guys. The bug tracking is fairly solid and they serve as an excellent source code host<p>* Hardware : Amazon EC2. We also use cloudfront (CDN) and a couple of other services. It's worked out amazingly well really.<p>* Accounting: My wife (PhD in Accounting). She uses Quickbooks I think. We use ADP for our payroll for quite awhile and that was <i>nightmare</i>. They were late with W2's and failed to pay the proper taxes they said they were paying. Just awful. My wife does payroll now.<p>* Email: We use authsmtp as our gateway. They've been very solid. Very few spam box issues. We also use mailchimp to manage our actual contact lists.<p>* Analytics: we use a combination of homegrown tools, google analytics, UserFly and CrazyEgg for usability and conversion analysis.<p>* Email: we use Google Apps. That's also worked out extremely well for us. No real issues and we rely on Google Docs quite a bit.<p>* Other services: We use Twilio to handle phone-tracking (it's an integral part of our product). We used UserVoice at one point and that was excellent.<p>I'll update with other stuff as I think about it.
Billing: Merchant accounts and Authorizenet's gateway, plus PayPal<p>Accounting: For analysis/forecasting, a custom programmed dashboard. For bookkeeping, Quickbooks.<p>Newsletters: MailChimp<p>Everythign else e-mail: Rackspace Email<p>Banking: The local bank<p>IT: If hardware breaks, Softlayer, Linode and Amazon take care of that. Anything else is my job.
Business : Cirrii.com<p>Email: Google Apps works fine for everything we need.<p>Code Management : Local Redmine install. Mutli repo and multi project is just what we need for a bunch or side projects or prototypes. Github for personal stuff. The issue tracking is not where it needs to be yet for an production project yet but getting there.<p>Deployments: Fabric and Chef-Solo. Internally a lot of virtualbox vm's.<p>EC2, Rackspace and hosteurope.de with : Haproxy lb's, powerDNS homegrown GeoDNS, AWS Cloudfront CDN.<p>HTH
I use Codebase to for source code management (mercurial) and for project ticketing.<p>I use Google Wave for most in-project communications.<p>Python/Django + jquery for dev.<p>WebFaction for web hosting <--- Opportunity here, there's definitely an opportunity to make simpler hosting for Django site. I believe there are people working on it already, though.
Billing: Recurly.<p>Accounting: Quickbooks<p>Provisioning: Home grown on EC2/GoGrid/Rackspace<p>Banking: Local bank<p>Newsletter: AWeber<p>IT: Depends. Most I handle, but some of the mundane is outsourced.<p>SCM: HG @ Codebase<p>If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't obsess as much as I did over the infrastructure. Check and re-check your backup & disaster recovery plan.
WordPress (and a lot of plugins)
DropBox
Remember the Milk
Basecamp
Linode + Virtualmin/Webmin for hosting
Paypal
G Adwords
G Analytics
G Apps for emails and calendar
When we started, we had a single Linux server and some laptops. Over time we added a VMWare server for testing and a VPS. Now our main file server is a Mac (as we didn't want to run Windows servers and needed PGP Whole Disk Encryption), we have a test VM Server and a couple of VPSs.