Who Do You Use?

Who Does Mars Dorian Use?

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:15:39 -0500

Mars Dorian is an expert on personal branding. He blogs about how to build your own brand, spread your influence and unlock your creativity. Here is what he uses to run his business:

Who Do You Use as a Host?

Hostmonster, because they have quite a good customer service and are reasonably priced.

Who Do You Use for Domains?

GoDaddy, and I ain’t proud of it. The only reason is of course the price, they’re dirt cheap when it comes to domains.

Who Do You Use for Web Analytics?

I use both - Wordpress Stats and Google Analytics, although I prefer the simplicity of Wordpress Stats. I just need a basic overview, because I pay more attention to subscribers and community interaction.

Who Do You Use to Blog?

Wordpress of course - the champion ! I believe it’s the best and most accessible blogging platform, and the possibility to add any kind of theme and plugin is INSANE !

Who Do You Use for Email?

Googlemail for the standard stuff, and my own hosted email address for clients and work ! But I redirect my hosted email address to my Google account, because I luv the overall interaction - you know, having the apps like calendar and documents only a click away is just an awesome web experience.

Any Other Services You Use We Should Now About?

Yeah, I’d recommend “Tungle Me” for EVERYONE who needs to schedule online calls in different time zones. I give consulting for people from all over the world, and this ass-kicking browser application allows me to easily schedule sessions, and it AUTOMATICALLY adjusts your client’s time zones to your own. And you know what ? The standard version - the only one you need - is FREE !

Who Does Colin Wright Use?

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 06:09:59 -0500

Colin Wright is a world travelling, serial entrepreneur. He helps companies and individuals build brands and also runs a very popular blog covering his somewhat extreme lifestyle. Let’s find out what Colin uses to run his business:

Who Do You Use as a Host?

I use 1&1 and Bluehost primarily, though one of my projects is up using Amazon’s sevices (EC2 and S3, I believe).

Who Do You Use for Domains?

1&1 and Bluehost mostly, but I have a few at GoDaddy. Usually I’ll buy wherever is cheapest, and sometimes it’s the latter for the odd top level domains.

Who Do You Use for Web Analytics?

Google Analytics primarily, every once in a while I’ll dabble with something else. Truth be told, I put more stock in the responsiveness of my audience (via email) than numbers (most of which seem fairly arbitrary). Maybe some service will change my mind eventually, though.

Who Do You Use to Blog?

Wordpress, and Tumblr for quick sites with less meat to them.

Who Do You Use for Email?

Gmail. Hands down one of the most useful tools I have at my disposal. I’ve got about 13 email address filtered into my account, and I label and archive everything as soon as it comes it. Inbox works as my to-do list, and I’m an Inbox Zero kind of guy, so it’s usually empty. Bliss.

Any Other Services You Use We Should Know About?

I use Mailchimp for newsletters (like it a LOT better than the alternatives), Evernote for notes/blog drafts/files, Dropbox for file exchanges (or WeTransfer for sending quick files to one person) and Hootsuite for social media.

Who Does David Hauser Use?

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 07:27:56 -0500

Daivd Hauser is a serial entrepreneur and founder of a number of prominent web apps and services. These include two of my favorite apps - Grasshopper, a virtual phone system, and Chargify, a billing management app for startups.

Who Do You Use as a Host?

Primary hosting is Rackspace Cloud for front end websites, but we have things hosted all over the place. Backend systems are hosted in our own datacenters sometimes, in the cloud with many providers, and for special applications in a high security datacenter.

Who Do You Use for Domains?

Use Network Solutions and directNIC. Had used GoDaddy in the past but a few years ago they caused a major issue that cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars and they did nothing about it.

Who Do You Use for Web Analytics?

Google Analytics is now our main package after using Omniture for a few years.

Who Do You Use to Blog?

Tumblr, super easy to use and love the quick integration.

Who Do You Use for Email?

Rackspace Managed Exchange

Who Does Ross Hill Use?

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 06:49:00 -0500

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.

Anthony Feint

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:18:00 -0500

Welcome to WhoDoYouUse. This site is partly inspired by UsesThis.com, a great voyeuristic look at what a number of influential tech peeps are using. I wanted to create this site to showcase some of the services people use as opposed to gadgets and hardware.

I’ve always been interested in how other startups and entrepreneurs host their apps and websites. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be interviewing many entrepreneurs with the same questions below. I’ve started things off with myself.

Who Do You Use as a Host?

I’m a bit all over the place. My blog is hosted on the Mediatemple grid as well as a number of small apps such as shot.fm and my URL shortner fnt.im. Task.fm, my primary startup, used to be on a Mediatemple DV server but now sits over on Rackspace Cloud Servers. I also have an old hosting account from ResellerZoom which is just a cheap shared hosting account I use for random sites.

Who Do You Use for Domains?

Most of my domain names are registered with GoDaddy. They have an interface that makes you want to punch yourself every time you use it, but you can’t beat them for price. Recently I came across IWantMyName, which has a stunning interface. They also offer a greater variety of extensions. I’ve started to use IWantMyName for all my new domain purchases and will eventually move over my existing domains.

Do You Use a CDN or Cloud Storage?

Yes. Both Rackspace Cloud Files which uses the Limelight CDN and MaxCDN. Rackspace Cloudfiles is currently missing a killer feature (cnames), which makes it pretty much useless for many applications. That’s why I’ve started using MaxCDN. MaxCDN seem like a great company but I’ve been having a couple of technical hiccups.

Who Do You Use to Blog?

Wordpress. I’ve always used Wordpress. I’m only just starting to figure out its true potential. Its definitely more of a cms than a blogging platform now. I’m sure I could move to a more lightweight platform (custom coded) that would serve my needs fine, but using Wordpress cuts development time right down. I also use Tumblr (for this blog and few random other ones). Tumblr has always frustrated me a little because I could never get things looking how I wanted them.

Who Do You Use for Email?

Google Apps for the domain powers my feint.me email addresses. There really is no other competing service that offers the same ease of use, spam protection and price (free).

Any Other Services We Should Now About?

I get asked pretty much every week what sms platform we use at Task.fm to send out SMS reminders. Currently it uses Twillio but in about 24 hours it will have been moved to Tropo (the move is happening as I speak). Tropo has better coverage and some pretty neat features that I’m looking forward to developing on.