Sometimes you can't do it all on your own. Or maybe you can, but you really shouldn't. Instead, focus on what you
really want to do, and let these people do all the other things.
GoDaddy.com
Get thee a domain! Yes, GoDaddy.com
has cheesy and sometimes controversial commercials, their name is out in left field
compared to Register.com or eNom, and they are really pushy when it comes to begging you to add just one
more thing to your shopping cart before checking out, but they also have a lot of good traits.
They have some of the cheapest prices on domain names and SSL certificates available today. They have great
tools for handling nameservers and DNS for you. And they make it very easy to manage your domain and add
other services as needed. Did we mention the prices?
Google Apps
If you are starting up a new business, charity, school, sports team, or scrapbooking group,
Google Apps is your best friend. For free, you get the best
anti-spam e-mail system out there, an easy-to-use document hosting site, a blog, a place to host
videos, a way to e-mail all of your customers/contributors/friends at once, and a long list
of other services that we haven't had the chance to play with yet. Right after you get your
domain purchased with GoDaddy, go right to Google and get e-mail started as well.
This is a list of some of the Google services we use every day:
Intuit Online Payroll (formerly PayCycle)
One of the worst parts of running a business is having to keep track of all the different
taxes you have to pay. With one or two employees, it's not impossible to handle it
yourself, but trust us, places like PayCycle
are worth a small monthly fee. For us, they
handle direct deposit for payroll, electronic filing for many federal and state forms
(W-2s included), and reminders for local taxes that they don't handle directly.
Also, we recently had a huge issue with year-end payroll that wasn't something that
was easily answered. Their customer support person knew to escalate the issue to the
next tier quickly, and in the end, they handled the issue better than we could have
ever expected. It's nice to do business with a company that actually takes
customer service seriously.
Freshbooks
Speaking of awesome customer service and a great company to work with,
Freshbooks is
another one of our favorites. If it weren't for Freshbooks, we'd probably never get
paid. Freshbooks does online invoicing, bookeeping, project communication,
time keeping, and even estimates. Our favorite services from them are the recurring
invoices, e-mailed invoices, and Sypher-branded customer login site.
Pingdom
We use Pingdom
to keep an eye on our servers and to make sure everything is
up and running. If a server goes down, we can be notified by e-mail or SMS
within a minute instead of by an angry customer an hour later. Plus, Pingdom
gives us a way to show how stable our servers have been. Check out our 99.9%
uptime for Connections Online
last year! And that's a 24/7 number without a Web Farm.
Spinrite
Spinrite
is a digital miracle worker. Use it to fix a hard drive
that won't boot. Use it to keep your hard drive running smoothly. Use it to
save your photos when you forgot to run backups like you know you should have.
Spinrite has saved us more than once and is well-worth the $89 price. Buy
a copy if you own any spinning hard drives. Seriously. Right now.
&
Podcasts
If you love technology as much as we do, and you like to listen to people talk
about the latest technology topics, you really should be listening to these podcasts!
These are just a few of our favorites.