8 ms·

Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2010 edition

240 points by joshu 16y ago

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.)

dieselz 16y ago
SendGrid - sends emails with high deliverability http://sendgrid.com/ http://sendgrid.com/ Braintree Payment Systems - charges credit cards http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ Server Density - monitors our servers from the inside http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/
mgrouchy 16y ago
Chargify ( http://chargify.com http://chargify.com ) -> recurring payments. Campaign monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com http://campaignmonitor.com )-> email campaigns. Github (http://github.com http://github.com ) -> vcs. Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com http://lighthouseapp.com ) -> bug tracking. Tender ( http://tenderapp.com http://tenderapp.com ) -> customer support.
- dh 16y ago
  Thanks for including Chargify
Regalla 16y ago
nice
frisco 16y ago
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-toolchain-in-2010 http://www.quora.com/What-SaaS-products-are-on-the-startups-...
- dotBen 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    Quora - no external hyperlinks - HN wins.
    - robryan 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
    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.
ekidd 16y ago
Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ ) -> Tracking feature backlog, release planning.
- santry 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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?
tptacek 16y ago
Github. Mailchimp.
joshu 16y ago
I'll roll up all the answers into a spreadsheet or table soon.
- frisco 16y ago
  Not into Quora? As several people answer it opens up a community-editable answer summary to bring them all together.
  - joshu 16y ago
    Shrug. Harder to organize. Maybe when it's done?
  - dotBen 16y ago
    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 16y ago
[deleted]
joshu 16y ago
Other threads I want to do: - web-includable services that integrate into a web page - production services (aws heroku etc.)
- babeKnuth 16y ago
  do 'em
- dotBen 16y ago
  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 16y ago
  Would love to see the HN hive mind take on both, fire away.
rwhitman 16y ago
I'm really into Postmark as an SMTP replacement for transactional emails - http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com And MailChimp for mailing lists.
callmeed 16y ago
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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?
  - endtime 16y ago
    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 16y ago
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
joshu 16y ago
I'm summarizing things here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6Drw http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6D...
- joshu 16y ago
  As of 8:15pm PST I've updated the spreadsheet.
gleb 16y ago
Acunote ( http://www.acunote.com http://www.acunote.com ) - project management, wiki, issue tracking, scrum software Tarsnap ( http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com ) - offsite backup DnsMadeEasy ( http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com ) - DNS TrustCommerce ( http://www.trustcommerce.com http://www.trustcommerce.com ) - CC gateway Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/apps http://www.google.com/apps ) - email AuthorityLabs ( http://authoritylabs.com http://authoritylabs.com ) - SEO rank monitoring GitHub ( http://github.com http://github.com ) - OSS projects vss
- shadytrees 16y ago
  Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.
  - redcap 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
    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?
jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
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 16y ago
  I kinda want to limit it to stuff in wide usage.
  - megamark16 16y ago
    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 16y ago
CloudKick ( http://cloudkick.com http://cloudkick.com ) - Configurable server monitoring with SMS alerts. Love this service. CoTweet ( http://cotweet.com http://cotweet.com ) - Shared Twitter account management. Great for support and guerrilla marketing. Uservoice ( http://uservoice.com http://uservoice.com ) - User feedback and support management. Dropbox ( http://dropbox.com http://dropbox.com ) - File sharing - we share the business dropbox with our individual dropboxes to share files. Droplr ( http://droplr.com http://droplr.com ) - Screenshot capture and sharing. Also allows for file sharing. As mentioned by others: GitHub ( http://github.com http://github.com ) - VCS Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a http://www.google.com/a ) - Email and documents. Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com http://www.pivotaltracker.com ) - Project management and issue tracking. Wordpress ( http://wordpress.com http://wordpress.com ) - Blog. These are very specific to Rails, but extremely useful: New Relic RPM ( http://newrelic.com 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 http://www.hoptoadapp.com ) - Rails exception monitoring and alerting.
- sfrancis 16y ago
  LogicMonitor (http://www.LogicMonitor.com http://www.LogicMonitor.com) - SaaS based, covers everything (servers, databases, storage, routers, apps, etc)
cvg 16y ago
bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org http://bitbucket.org) - mercurial vss, similar to github
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  with unlimited public AND private repositories.
torial 16y ago
I've had good experiences with http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php for bug tracking. Also provides exports of all data in an SQLite DB or in CSV format if desired.
guelo 16y ago
I've been liking http://www.freshbooks.com/ http://www.freshbooks.com/ for invoices.
- webgambit 16y ago
  +1 for freshbooks. Met some of the team a little over a year ago. Great group of folks.
presto8 16y ago
For backup, I've been quite pleased with CrashPlan.
scharan 16y ago
Evernote (https://www.evernote.com/ https://www.evernote.com/) Notes service. Clients available for Mac, Windows, iPad etc.
SudarshanP 16y ago
http://www.trada.com/ http://www.trada.com/ Crowdsourced SEM
- aymeric 16y ago
  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 16y ago
SendGrid - transactional and mass email PivotalTracker - daily todo FogBugz - customer support via email
gubatron 16y ago
macosx | ubuntu emacs, eclipse version control tool of your choice (mercurial | git | svn) python, bash, java. a brain.
bl4k 16y ago
JIRA Studio - http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/ http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/ BitBucket - http://bitbucket.org/ http://bitbucket.org/ Salesforce - http://salesforce.com/ http://salesforce.com/ Gapps - http://apps.google.com/ http://apps.google.com/ ZenDesk - http://zendesk.com/ http://zendesk.com/ EasyDNS - http://easydns.com http://easydns.com most of these aren't cheap, but through a process of trial and error I found out that they are the best.
RK 16y ago
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
there 16y ago
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/ http://corduroysite.com/) for invoicing, writing checks, downloading bank transactions, and receiving payments. but i wrote and host that too.
sharjeel 16y ago
Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/ http://www.delicious.com/) - keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues :-) PS: This post is going to my delicious account
- rkwz 16y ago
  >keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues Nice idea! Definitely superior to sharing links by IM/email. Thank you! :)
  - koevet 16y ago
    Pinboard (http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in) is my choice for sharing bookmarks.
iuguy 16y ago
We use: Salesforce for CRM Google Apps for Mail, Chat, non-sensitive Doc sharing Mailchimp for Mailshots Gradwell for VoIP Github for source control
billpaetzke 16y ago
Leads360 -------- StrongMail - email server & deliverability FogBugz - bug tracking ScrewTurn Wiki - (free) internal wiki for dev team (we're a .NET shop; YMMV) ZenDesk - support help info/knowledge base RightNow - support ticketing and chat Google Analytics - for broad technical analysis of our users Leads360 - we (well, our sales ppl) use our own product for CRM/lead management
sl_ 16y ago
http://circonus.com/ http://circonus.com/ - SaaS Nagios and Ganglia replacement
jasondavies 16y ago
Recurly for recurring billing (http://recurly.com/ 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/ http://unfuddle.com/) and github (http://github.com/ http://github.com/) for bug tracking. JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/ http://www.jungledisk.com/) for off-site backup. Uses your S3 account to store encrypted backups. Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/) for monitoring UserVoice (http://uservoice.com/ http://uservoice.com/) for customer feedback
lfittl 16y ago
There is a ton of good & well-sorted stuff at http://startuptools.pbworks.com/ http://startuptools.pbworks.com/ Collected by a couple of UK startups (Songkick, Huddle, etc.)
PMHacker 16y ago
TaskPoint http://www.taskpoint.com http://www.taskpoint.com issue tracking, project management and team collaboration
mcdowall 16y ago
Google Chrome - (Bookmark Syncing across Home & Work) Google Apps - Email, Video Chat & Calender Market Samurai - SEO Google Analytics - SEO Chargify - Payments Geckoboard - Live Dashboard Basecamp - Project Management (Mainly to-do's) Dropbox - File Backup Mailchimp - Email (Cant recommend them enough) Xero - Accounts Zopim - Customer Service / Lead Capture Load Impact - Website Stress Testing
adw 16y ago
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.
swah 16y ago
Still in Emacs, waiting for something better to show up.
bnmrrs 16y ago
SourceRepo - Git hosting EC2/S3 Google apps - Email, Calendar, Docs, GTalk Yammer - Not seriously used Pivotal Tracker - Managing stories SalesForce - CRM
jeffepp 16y ago
At zferral.com: Mailchimp (http://mailchimp.com http://mailchimp.com) = email marketing BatchBook (http://BatchBook.com http://BatchBook.com) = CRM Dropbox (http://dropbox.com http://dropbox.com) = File Sharing Google Apps = Webmail Chargify (http://chargify.com http://chargify.com) = Recurring Billing Zendesk (http://zendesk.com http://zendesk.com) = Support SnapEngage (http://snapabug.com http://snapabug.com) = Proactive Chat StatsMix (http://statsmix.com http://statsmix.com) = Analytics zferral (http://zferral.com http://zferral.com) = Affiliate and referral mgt ^^own product
nkassis 16y ago
My list is very similar to everyone but: Linode(http://www.linode.com http://www.linode.com) dns, hosting. I find them cheaper and easier than EC2 Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com http://www.dropbox.com) Shared folders Google Apps (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) Easy way to get email calendar docs ... GitHub (http://github.com http://github.com)
yycom 16y ago
What do teams use for single-sign-on or password management with so many hosted services?
darklajid 16y ago
Gitorious (http://www.gitorious.org http://www.gitorious.org) Seems like everyone's on Github here, but we host it ourselves (no open source activity, unfortunately.. =() Redmine (http://www.redmine.org http://www.redmine.org) For tickets, development plans. Tied into git. OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/ http://www.osqa.net/) In evaluation for now: Internal "knowledgebase" stackoverflow clone for product related things Hudson (http://www.hudson-ci.org http://www.hudson-ci.org) Continuous integration (although I'm just now trying to get this behemoth to start using it..)
dolinsky 16y ago
I've seen a few recommendations for Mailchimp, and I'm wondering if anyone else has used Sailthru ( http://www.sailthru.com 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.
benologist 16y ago
At Playtomic: - mongohq.com for some MongoDB databases, gradually shifting some bits and pieces over to that - Google Apps for email - Google Analytics for the website - Amazon S3 for file storage - tadalist.com for stuff I should be doing now - dnspark.net for my DNS stuff, I have enough servers to do this myself pretty robustly but @ 200m hits a day and growing I'd much rather pay $13 a year and use them.
wordx 16y ago
Sauce Labs ( http://saucelabs.com http://saucelabs.com ) - automated functional testing with Selenium
aeden 16y ago
Chargify ( http://chargify.com/ http://chargify.com/ ) - recurring billing DNSimple ( http://dnsimple.com/ http://dnsimple.com/ ) - domain and dns management GitHub ( http://github.com/ http://github.com/ ) - source code DropBox ( http://dropbox.com/ http://dropbox.com/ ) - file sharing PivotalTracker ( http://pivotaltracker.com http://pivotaltracker.com ) - feature/issue tracking SendGrid ( http://sendgrid.com http://sendgrid.com ) - outbound app email GetSatisfaction ( http://getsatisfaction.com/ http://getsatisfaction.com/ ) - for community support Google Apps for mail and docs Google Analytics for web site analytics MixPanel ( http://mixpanel.com/ http://mixpanel.com/ ) for deeper application analytics Harvest ( http://harvestapp.com/ http://harvestapp.com/ ) for time tracking and billing Pingdom ( http://pingdom.com/ http://pingdom.com/ ) for monitoring
gtani 16y ago
compare/contrast: 1.3 years ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656147 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656147
dh 16y ago
What a great question, I was looking for this data for a presentation at gave at FOWA 2010 last week. See slide 30 http://www.slideshare.net/davidhauser/fowa-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/davidhauser/fowa-2010
nl 16y ago
I guess I use the standard toolset most people here use, with one thing no one else has mentioned. I have a cheap ($100/year) Dreamhost account, which has unlimited domains, and unlimited mysql databases. I use the websites for experiments and my blog etc, but the good thing is that it comes with unlimited subversion hosting, trac, and jabber accounts. (I hesitate to mention this here, because it's a bit of a pyramid scheme in that you can give $90 discounts to your friends and then get an affiliate cut, but even that is actually pretty good (they end up with $10 subversion). Email me for a code if you are interested.)

240 points by joshu 16y ago

dieselz 16y ago

SendGrid - sends emails with high deliverability http://sendgrid.com/ http://sendgrid.com/ Braintree Payment Systems - charges credit cards http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ Server Density - monitors our servers from the inside http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/

mgrouchy 16y ago

Chargify ( http://chargify.com http://chargify.com ) -> recurring payments. Campaign monitor (http://campaignmonitor.com http://campaignmonitor.com )-> email campaigns. Github (http://github.com http://github.com ) -> vcs. Lighthouse ( http://lighthouseapp.com http://lighthouseapp.com ) -> bug tracking. Tender ( http://tenderapp.com http://tenderapp.com ) -> customer support.

dh 16y ago
Thanks for including Chargify

Regalla 16y ago

nice

frisco 16y ago

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-toolchain-in-2010 http://www.quora.com/What-SaaS-products-are-on-the-startups-...

dotBen 16y ago
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 16y ago
  Quora - no external hyperlinks - HN wins.
  - robryan 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
  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.

ekidd 16y ago

Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ http://www.pivotaltracker.com/ ) -> Tracking feature backlog, release planning.

santry 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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?

tptacek 16y ago

Github. Mailchimp.

joshu 16y ago

I'll roll up all the answers into a spreadsheet or table soon.

frisco 16y ago
Not into Quora? As several people answer it opens up a community-editable answer summary to bring them all together.
- joshu 16y ago
  Shrug. Harder to organize. Maybe when it's done?
- dotBen 16y ago
  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 16y ago

[deleted]

joshu 16y ago

Other threads I want to do: - web-includable services that integrate into a web page - production services (aws heroku etc.)

babeKnuth 16y ago
do 'em
dotBen 16y ago
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 16y ago
Would love to see the HN hive mind take on both, fire away.

rwhitman 16y ago

I'm really into Postmark as an SMTP replacement for transactional emails - http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com And MailChimp for mailing lists.

callmeed 16y ago

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 16y ago

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 16y ago
Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?
- endtime 16y ago
  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 16y ago

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

joshu 16y ago

I'm summarizing things here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6Drw http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6D...

joshu 16y ago
As of 8:15pm PST I've updated the spreadsheet.

gleb 16y ago

Acunote ( http://www.acunote.com http://www.acunote.com ) - project management, wiki, issue tracking, scrum software Tarsnap ( http://www.tarsnap.com http://www.tarsnap.com ) - offsite backup DnsMadeEasy ( http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com ) - DNS TrustCommerce ( http://www.trustcommerce.com http://www.trustcommerce.com ) - CC gateway Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/apps http://www.google.com/apps ) - email AuthorityLabs ( http://authoritylabs.com http://authoritylabs.com ) - SEO rank monitoring GitHub ( http://github.com http://github.com ) - OSS projects vss

shadytrees 16y ago
Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.
- redcap 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
  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?

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

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 16y ago
I kinda want to limit it to stuff in wide usage.
- megamark16 16y ago
  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 16y ago

CloudKick ( http://cloudkick.com http://cloudkick.com ) - Configurable server monitoring with SMS alerts. Love this service. CoTweet ( http://cotweet.com http://cotweet.com ) - Shared Twitter account management. Great for support and guerrilla marketing. Uservoice ( http://uservoice.com http://uservoice.com ) - User feedback and support management. Dropbox ( http://dropbox.com http://dropbox.com ) - File sharing - we share the business dropbox with our individual dropboxes to share files. Droplr ( http://droplr.com http://droplr.com ) - Screenshot capture and sharing. Also allows for file sharing. As mentioned by others: GitHub ( http://github.com http://github.com ) - VCS Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a http://www.google.com/a ) - Email and documents. Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com http://www.pivotaltracker.com ) - Project management and issue tracking. Wordpress ( http://wordpress.com http://wordpress.com ) - Blog. These are very specific to Rails, but extremely useful: New Relic RPM ( http://newrelic.com 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 http://www.hoptoadapp.com ) - Rails exception monitoring and alerting.

sfrancis 16y ago
LogicMonitor (http://www.LogicMonitor.com http://www.LogicMonitor.com) - SaaS based, covers everything (servers, databases, storage, routers, apps, etc)

cvg 16y ago

bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org http://bitbucket.org) - mercurial vss, similar to github

sandGorgon 16y ago
with unlimited public AND private repositories.

torial 16y ago

I've had good experiences with http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php for bug tracking. Also provides exports of all data in an SQLite DB or in CSV format if desired.

guelo 16y ago

I've been liking http://www.freshbooks.com/ http://www.freshbooks.com/ for invoices.

webgambit 16y ago
+1 for freshbooks. Met some of the team a little over a year ago. Great group of folks.

presto8 16y ago

For backup, I've been quite pleased with CrashPlan.

scharan 16y ago

Evernote (https://www.evernote.com/ https://www.evernote.com/) Notes service. Clients available for Mac, Windows, iPad etc.

SudarshanP 16y ago

http://www.trada.com/ http://www.trada.com/ Crowdsourced SEM

aymeric 16y ago
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 16y ago

SendGrid - transactional and mass email PivotalTracker - daily todo FogBugz - customer support via email

gubatron 16y ago

macosx | ubuntu emacs, eclipse version control tool of your choice (mercurial | git | svn) python, bash, java. a brain.

bl4k 16y ago

JIRA Studio - http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/ http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/ BitBucket - http://bitbucket.org/ http://bitbucket.org/ Salesforce - http://salesforce.com/ http://salesforce.com/ Gapps - http://apps.google.com/ http://apps.google.com/ ZenDesk - http://zendesk.com/ http://zendesk.com/ EasyDNS - http://easydns.com http://easydns.com most of these aren't cheap, but through a process of trial and error I found out that they are the best.

RK 16y ago

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

there 16y ago

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/ http://corduroysite.com/) for invoicing, writing checks, downloading bank transactions, and receiving payments. but i wrote and host that too.

sharjeel 16y ago

Delicious (http://www.delicious.com/ http://www.delicious.com/) - keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues :-) PS: This post is going to my delicious account

rkwz 16y ago
>keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues Nice idea! Definitely superior to sharing links by IM/email. Thank you! :)
- koevet 16y ago
  Pinboard (http://pinboard.in http://pinboard.in) is my choice for sharing bookmarks.

iuguy 16y ago

We use: Salesforce for CRM Google Apps for Mail, Chat, non-sensitive Doc sharing Mailchimp for Mailshots Gradwell for VoIP Github for source control

billpaetzke 16y ago

Leads360 -------- StrongMail - email server & deliverability FogBugz - bug tracking ScrewTurn Wiki - (free) internal wiki for dev team (we're a .NET shop; YMMV) ZenDesk - support help info/knowledge base RightNow - support ticketing and chat Google Analytics - for broad technical analysis of our users Leads360 - we (well, our sales ppl) use our own product for CRM/lead management

sl_ 16y ago

http://circonus.com/ http://circonus.com/ - SaaS Nagios and Ganglia replacement

jasondavies 16y ago

Recurly for recurring billing (http://recurly.com/ 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/ http://unfuddle.com/) and github (http://github.com/ http://github.com/) for bug tracking. JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/ http://www.jungledisk.com/) for off-site backup. Uses your S3 account to store encrypted backups. Server Density (http://www.serverdensity.com/ http://www.serverdensity.com/) for monitoring UserVoice (http://uservoice.com/ http://uservoice.com/) for customer feedback

lfittl 16y ago

There is a ton of good & well-sorted stuff at http://startuptools.pbworks.com/ http://startuptools.pbworks.com/ Collected by a couple of UK startups (Songkick, Huddle, etc.)

PMHacker 16y ago

TaskPoint http://www.taskpoint.com http://www.taskpoint.com issue tracking, project management and team collaboration

mcdowall 16y ago

Google Chrome - (Bookmark Syncing across Home & Work) Google Apps - Email, Video Chat & Calender Market Samurai - SEO Google Analytics - SEO Chargify - Payments Geckoboard - Live Dashboard Basecamp - Project Management (Mainly to-do's) Dropbox - File Backup Mailchimp - Email (Cant recommend them enough) Xero - Accounts Zopim - Customer Service / Lead Capture Load Impact - Website Stress Testing

adw 16y ago

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.

swah 16y ago

Still in Emacs, waiting for something better to show up.

bnmrrs 16y ago

SourceRepo - Git hosting EC2/S3 Google apps - Email, Calendar, Docs, GTalk Yammer - Not seriously used Pivotal Tracker - Managing stories SalesForce - CRM

jeffepp 16y ago

At zferral.com: Mailchimp (http://mailchimp.com http://mailchimp.com) = email marketing BatchBook (http://BatchBook.com http://BatchBook.com) = CRM Dropbox (http://dropbox.com http://dropbox.com) = File Sharing Google Apps = Webmail Chargify (http://chargify.com http://chargify.com) = Recurring Billing Zendesk (http://zendesk.com http://zendesk.com) = Support SnapEngage (http://snapabug.com http://snapabug.com) = Proactive Chat StatsMix (http://statsmix.com http://statsmix.com) = Analytics zferral (http://zferral.com http://zferral.com) = Affiliate and referral mgt ^^own product

nkassis 16y ago

My list is very similar to everyone but: Linode(http://www.linode.com http://www.linode.com) dns, hosting. I find them cheaper and easier than EC2 Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com http://www.dropbox.com) Shared folders Google Apps (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) Easy way to get email calendar docs ... GitHub (http://github.com http://github.com)

yycom 16y ago

What do teams use for single-sign-on or password management with so many hosted services?

darklajid 16y ago

Gitorious (http://www.gitorious.org http://www.gitorious.org) Seems like everyone's on Github here, but we host it ourselves (no open source activity, unfortunately.. =() Redmine (http://www.redmine.org http://www.redmine.org) For tickets, development plans. Tied into git. OSQA (http://www.osqa.net/ http://www.osqa.net/) In evaluation for now: Internal "knowledgebase" stackoverflow clone for product related things Hudson (http://www.hudson-ci.org http://www.hudson-ci.org) Continuous integration (although I'm just now trying to get this behemoth to start using it..)

dolinsky 16y ago

I've seen a few recommendations for Mailchimp, and I'm wondering if anyone else has used Sailthru ( http://www.sailthru.com 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.

benologist 16y ago

At Playtomic: - mongohq.com for some MongoDB databases, gradually shifting some bits and pieces over to that - Google Apps for email - Google Analytics for the website - Amazon S3 for file storage - tadalist.com for stuff I should be doing now - dnspark.net for my DNS stuff, I have enough servers to do this myself pretty robustly but @ 200m hits a day and growing I'd much rather pay $13 a year and use them.

wordx 16y ago

Sauce Labs ( http://saucelabs.com http://saucelabs.com ) - automated functional testing with Selenium

aeden 16y ago

Chargify ( http://chargify.com/ http://chargify.com/ ) - recurring billing DNSimple ( http://dnsimple.com/ http://dnsimple.com/ ) - domain and dns management GitHub ( http://github.com/ http://github.com/ ) - source code DropBox ( http://dropbox.com/ http://dropbox.com/ ) - file sharing PivotalTracker ( http://pivotaltracker.com http://pivotaltracker.com ) - feature/issue tracking SendGrid ( http://sendgrid.com http://sendgrid.com ) - outbound app email GetSatisfaction ( http://getsatisfaction.com/ http://getsatisfaction.com/ ) - for community support Google Apps for mail and docs Google Analytics for web site analytics MixPanel ( http://mixpanel.com/ http://mixpanel.com/ ) for deeper application analytics Harvest ( http://harvestapp.com/ http://harvestapp.com/ ) for time tracking and billing Pingdom ( http://pingdom.com/ http://pingdom.com/ ) for monitoring

gtani 16y ago

compare/contrast: 1.3 years ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656147 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656147

dh 16y ago

What a great question, I was looking for this data for a presentation at gave at FOWA 2010 last week. See slide 30 http://www.slideshare.net/davidhauser/fowa-2010 http://www.slideshare.net/davidhauser/fowa-2010

nl 16y ago

I guess I use the standard toolset most people here use, with one thing no one else has mentioned. I have a cheap ($100/year) Dreamhost account, which has unlimited domains, and unlimited mysql databases. I use the websites for experiments and my blog etc, but the good thing is that it comes with unlimited subversion hosting, trac, and jabber accounts. (I hesitate to mention this here, because it's a bit of a pyramid scheme in that you can give $90 discounts to your friends and then get an affiliate cut, but even that is actually pretty good (they end up with $10 subversion). Email me for a code if you are interested.)