I've been in the web industry for more than a cool decade now and I'll tell you I haven't had so much fun! I've been sitting in front of my Mac Book for the past 24 hours (with sleep in between) and I'm simply in awe of how easy it is to run a business online today.
I call it the "Swiss Army Knife 2.0" or SAK2.0 for short. Here's what SAK2.0 offers today:
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Simply put, Google Apps is a godsend to all SMEs like Spiragram. I finally moved my company off the web-one-oh-ish webhosting plan (no more cpanel!!) to the elegantly-designed and just-enough and most importantly, free suite of apps that Google gives away. I get email accounts, mailing lists, POP access but we're all switching to gmail anyways, shared calendars, a customizable portal for everyone in the company (although I doubt they'd use it much), and a shared space for documents and spreadsheets.
Ok, I admit I still have domain names managed in my old webhost interface and I'm seriously considering moving to dnsmadeeasy.com.
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Mojo Helpdesk is a web-based ticket tracking system which we got all our clients to use to communicate with our programmers. This ticket-queue system has essentially done away with client meetings, meeting minutes, email shuttles, ad nauseum just to get a simple fix on the project. The key innovation with Mojo Helpdesk's approach is to make the UI simple enough for our non-techie clients to use. Due to the tremendous value-add to our business, we actually subscribe to the most expensive Enterprise Plan. But frankly, at $99 per month, it's still a steal!
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Once in a while, we'll hit a contract where we really need the details. Yes, the nightmare of every programmer on the face of this earth - timesheeting. Harvest is timesheeting made easy. At Spiragram, Harvest is useful in keeping track with the amount of time we spent on maintenance work, which is typically structured based on a pre-determined hours per month. Harvest reports allow us to reflect to clients how they are over-using their hours and they should look into increasing their maintenance budgets in the next billing cycle. Once again, with Harvest, we're on their Business Plan, $40 per month.
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Spiragram is a Rails shop and we eat our own dog food. But we need a good solid dog dish to do that. My vote goes to Slicehost , a Xen-virtualized linux hosting environment. We got a 512slice which gives us 512MB memory, 20GB storage and 200GB bandwidth/mth. This gives us enough resources to power MySQL, Rails, Mongrel and Nginx, which in turn runs this blog on Mephisto. At $38/month, Slicehost is one of the most cost-effective options out there today.
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This is one of the better wiki hosting providers out there (what I really mean is that their interface is slick). I still have some complaints about Stikipad right now: response time (from Singapore) and irritating multiple logins.
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If you're reading this blog, I assume you own at least one website. The thing about using Google Analytics is that it works so cool that once you're hooked, you'll start asking yourself all the right questions about your web-business. And if you look past Google-Analytics' pretty front, it actually offers you many suggestions how you can grow your web presence.
I think there's much more stuff that I'm using today (Google Groups, Google Reader, Facebook and many of its wonderful 3rd party apps) which I'll talk about in another post. For now, SAK2.0 proves to be really good in helping me run my business.
Ok, you all have fun over the weekend, eh?
