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Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2010 edition

240 points| joshu | 15 years ago | reply

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.)

92 comments

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[+] gleb|15 years ago|reply
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

[+] andrewf|15 years ago|reply
GitHub isn't just for OSS (you'll have to pay though)
[+] shadytrees|15 years ago|reply
Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.
[+] mpakes|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ekidd|15 years ago|reply
Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ ) -> Tracking feature backlog, release planning.
[+] santry|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jasondavies|15 years ago|reply
Recurly for recurring billing (http://recurly.com/) (they just added support for VAT, ideal for us in the UK, and they support SagePay UK as a payment gateway as well as PayPal)

Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com/) and github (http://github.com/) for bug tracking.

JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/) for off-site backup. Uses your S3 account to store encrypted backups.

Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/) for monitoring

UserVoice (http://uservoice.com/) for customer feedback

[+] joshu|15 years ago|reply
Other threads I want to do:

- web-includable services that integrate into a web page

- production services (aws heroku etc.)

[+] dotBen|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Would love to see the HN hive mind take on both, fire away.
[+] RK|15 years ago|reply
I'm a grad student right now, so I'm using tools for a different purpose, but thought I'd list them anyway:

Dropbox - backup and sharing with research group and collaborators

Mendeley - cloud based article and citation management (great for bibtex)

Google Code with Mercurial - OSS projects that are tied into my research

EC2 - large scale, distributed simulations (data stored on S3)

Remember The Milk - trying to manage my tasks

[+] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] sharjeel|15 years ago|reply
Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/) - keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues :-)

PS: This post is going to my delicious account

[+] rkwz|15 years ago|reply
>keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues

Nice idea! Definitely superior to sharing links by IM/email. Thank you! :)

[+] adw|15 years ago|reply
At Timetric:

Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, Cloudfront) (plus a little bit of Google App Engine)

GitHub (source control)

Pivotal Tracker (dev team backlog)

Highrise (biz dev tracking)

Mailchimp (mailing lists)

Moo (printable stuff - largely business cards)

Dropbox (shared folders)

Google Apps (email, docs)

Google Analytics (analytics)

Xero (accounting)

Stuff we do internally which we could probably outsource somehow, but it doesn't make sense: Roundup (bug tracking), Jabber, munin.

[+] there|15 years ago|reply
i still seem to want to host everything myself (email, dns, backups, etc). old habits die hard.

the only saas i use is Corduroy (http://corduroysite.com/) for invoicing, writing checks, downloading bank transactions, and receiving payments. but i wrote and host that too.

[+] aeden|15 years ago|reply
Chargify ( http://chargify.com/ ) - recurring billing

DNSimple ( http://dnsimple.com/ ) - domain and dns management

GitHub ( http://github.com/ ) - source code

DropBox ( http://dropbox.com/ ) - file sharing

PivotalTracker ( http://pivotaltracker.com ) - feature/issue tracking

SendGrid ( http://sendgrid.com ) - outbound app email

GetSatisfaction ( http://getsatisfaction.com/ ) - for community support

Google Apps for mail and docs

Google Analytics for web site analytics

MixPanel ( http://mixpanel.com/ ) for deeper application analytics

Harvest ( http://harvestapp.com/ ) for time tracking and billing

Pingdom ( http://pingdom.com/ ) for monitoring

[+] dolinsky|15 years ago|reply
I've seen a few recommendations for Mailchimp, and I'm wondering if anyone else has used Sailthru ( http://www.sailthru.com ). We've been using them at zootoo.com for well over 2 years, both for transactional emails and campaigns, and have been extremely happy. They're also way ahead of Mailchimp and other email SaaS providers with their Horizon customer tracking tool that enables customized newsletters based on the individuals browsing habits (Horizon is in beta right now but has been written about in the press).

Full disclosure - I know the owners personally and have worked with them in the past, but that doesn't take away from how awesome the product is.

[+] endtime|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?