Who Does Ross Hill Use?
Ross Hill is the founder of Coverhunt, an app for finding CD covers. He’s also heavily involved in the Australian entrepreneurial scene and is the founder of The Hive - a popular entrepreneurial group that runs in various locations across Australia. you can follow Ross on Twitter here.
Who Do You Use as a Host?
I used A Small Orange asmallorange for a long time to host the freelance client projects I used to do, but when my Coverhunt CD cover search site started attracting 100k people a month they (understandably) kicked me off the shared server and I moved to a Mediatemple (gs) account and I haven’t had any scaling issues since. I have a handful of sites there including The Hive, Mindful* and my individual site. I love mt’s cluster hosting system because worrying about hosting and technical scaling shouldn’t be an issue in 2011. As an entrepreneur you need to be focussed on the human side of business more than the tech.
Who Do You Use for Domains?
Godaddy for .com’s and Ziphosting for .com.au’s
Who Do You Use for Web Analytics?
Google Analytics is great for a lot of things, and I like to add in Crazyegg as well for a more visual page based view of what’s happening. For large enterprise projects where you often can’t install something like Google Analytics (easily or fast enough) or for simple things where that would be overkill, I will often use bit.ly links to track the click throughs. One example is an enterprise newsletter that for list security reasons had to be sent through Outlook - by using bit.ly links I could get a good feel for the popular content even though it was a fairly manual process. You can even link to firewalled URLs so this gives great visibility.
Who Do You Use to Blog?
I personally use Wordpress.org on my own server, with a tailored template, because I like the templating simplicity and functional extensibility through the huge plugin community. Since I have a background in code that suits me really well because I can make tweaks whenever I feel like it, but I recommend to most friends that they use Posterous with a custom domain because it is much easier to get started with and as long as you have the custom domain in place you can always upgrade to something more flexible later. My mate Steve Hopkins has been blogging for 4 years and only just recently got a custom template built - most people will say they will do it sooner than that but in my experience the reality is usually quite different. Don’t rush the fancy bits - just start posting.
That said, I have recently stopped publicly blogging and begun using the letter.ly platform to host my Field Notes as a premium newsletter subscription. That has been really fun though the letter.ly service is still in its early days so if I were doing it in a business context I would use Mailchimp’s premium newsletter features to gain the greater stability and richer reports.
Who Do You Use for Email?
I use Google Apps for Business for most of my projects. Personally it is great to have a cloud based service with the power of Microsoft Exchange and good compatibility so that my iPhone mail contacts and calendar is synced in realtime with my laptop, iPad and the web. For an organisation like The Hive Google Apps has been fantastic because as a not-for-profit we want to minimise effort and maximise impact, and being able to set up a new organiser in 5 minutes with everything is fantastic.
Any Other Services You Use We Should Now About?
Yammer is incredibly useful within an organisational context. It is like a private Facebook for your enterprise and you can use it in smaller teams of say 10 all the way up to thousands of people like I experience working at Deloitte Australia. Being cloud based there is no installation process, and IT can easily integrate with their existing security services so that is also quite simple. Being freemium you can get started instantly by going to Yammer.com and focus on what you actually use it for, instead of the tech itself. When scale becomes an issue or you require heavier security the premium options are available, like any freemium service.
For The Hive we use Basecamp to organise ourselves across multiple cities in Australia. We only use a few features but having everything in one place and giving everyone access to everything lets us focus on the events instead of the management.
Mailchimp is fantastic in many ways, for maintaining email list databases and sending emails that give you really practical reporting. I love the chimp.
I find Twitter to be amazing for lots of things, to keep a really light presence with huge connectivity. I can see what friends and colleagues are doing and paying attention to as well as ask questions where I don’t know what I don’t know. Google will find me something I know exists, but Twitter (and Yammer) let me find things that are unknown and relevant through social recommendations.
Individually I use the cloud a lot because that is where most media should be stored (it’s 2011 not 1999). Flickr Pro hosts my photo collection. The Sixty One is great for music streaming. I have deleted all but around 20 of the albums on my iPhone because I can stream and explore new music most of the time through the web. Vimeo HD is great for entertainment. Make sure you have a backup system like Backupify in place of course in case the sky falls, but in general the clouds are probably more reliable than your local environment.
I have recently been using Eventbrite as the ticket platform for the Mindful* events. I had never used it before, and in 5 minutes I had the first tickets set up and embedded on my site. A few minutes later people were buying tickets and the cash was in my Paypal account. When the event is ready I can print out an RSVP list and check people in by scanning the barcode on their printed ticket using my iPhone camera. That’s amazing!
Basically every service I use is cloud based. The only app I use on my iPhone that wasn’t was Notes (for daily action list and notes) and now even that syncs with the web.
