
Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2010 edition - joshu
When I first started delicious, we had to host most of the services ourselves. CVS, mail, mailing lists, etc etc etc.<p>These days, lots of that stuff is available as SaaS. What are the tools and services people use instead of hosting their own?<p>(I'm not talking about actual production services like EC2 and Heroku and whatnot. We can go over this in another thread.)
======
gleb
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

~~~
shadytrees
Seconding Tarsnap. Can't recommend it enough.

~~~
mieses
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?

~~~
merijnv
Tarsnap also does encryption and compression. Now _you_ might be able to
implement something like that better then cperciva, but I know _I_ sure as
hell am not capable of implementing any system as secure as reliable as him.
Does this knowledge cost money? Yes. Is it worth it? Well, that depends on
you.

~~~
jasondavies
JungleDisk does encryption and you only have to pay for S3 usage after the
one-off license fee.

~~~
streety
Is that offer still available? I was under the impression that any new
subscribers had to pay a monthly fee and it had been that way for a year or
more.

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joshu
I'm summarizing things here:

[http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6D...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tmxXdwODQTCsdQzatHS6Drw)

~~~
joshu
As of 8:15pm PST I've updated the spreadsheet.

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mpakes
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.

~~~
sfrancis
LogicMonitor (<http://www.LogicMonitor.com>) - SaaS based, covers everything
(servers, databases, storage, routers, apps, etc)

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

~~~
santry
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
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?

------
dieselz
SendGrid - sends emails with high deliverability <http://sendgrid.com/>

Braintree Payment Systems - charges credit cards
<http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/>

Server Density - monitors our servers from the inside
<http://www.serverdensity.com/>

------
jasondavies
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

------
mgrouchy
Chargify ( <http://chargify.com> ) -> recurring payments.

Campaign monitor (<http://campaignmonitor.com> )-> email campaigns.

Github (<http://github.com> ) -> vcs.

Lighthouse ( <http://lighthouseapp.com> ) -> bug tracking.

Tender ( <http://tenderapp.com> ) -> customer support.

~~~
dh
Thanks for including Chargify

------
joshu
Other threads I want to do:

\- web-includable services that integrate into a web page

\- production services (aws heroku etc.)

~~~
dotBen
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.

------
bl4k
JIRA Studio - <http://www.atlassian.com/hosted/studio/>

BitBucket - <http://bitbucket.org/>

Salesforce - <http://salesforce.com/>

Gapps - <http://apps.google.com/>

ZenDesk - <http://zendesk.com/>

EasyDNS - <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
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
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
Delicious (<http://www.delicious.com/>) - keeping track of important bookmarks
and sharing with colleagues :-)

PS: This post is going to my delicious account

~~~
rkwz
> _keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues_

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

~~~
koevet
Pinboard (<http://pinboard.in>) is my choice for sharing bookmarks.

------
adw
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
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.

------
rwhitman
I'm really into Postmark as an SMTP replacement for transactional emails -
<http://www.postmarkapp.com>

And MailChimp for mailing lists.

------
aeden
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

------
guelo
I've been liking <http://www.freshbooks.com/> for invoices.

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

------
dolinsky
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
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
Why do you run redmine in VirtualBox? Isn't it ruby?

~~~
endtime
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.

------
jeffepp
At zferral.com:

Mailchimp (<http://mailchimp.com>) = email marketing

BatchBook (<http://BatchBook.com>) = CRM

Dropbox (<http://dropbox.com>) = File Sharing

Google Apps = Webmail

Chargify (<http://chargify.com>) = Recurring Billing

Zendesk (<http://zendesk.com>) = Support

SnapEngage (<http://snapabug.com>) = Proactive Chat

StatsMix (<http://statsmix.com>) = Analytics

zferral (<http://zferral.com>) = Affiliate and referral mgt

^^own product

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

~~~
dotBen
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)_

~~~
ktsmith
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.

~~~
vdm
++. No way in hell I am letting Quora know who all my friends are, without
first checking out the site and building trust. OpenID (like stackoverflow) or
GTFO.

------
nl
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.)

------
darklajid
Gitorious (<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>)

For tickets, development plans. Tied into git.

OSQA (<http://www.osqa.net/>)

In evaluation for now: Internal "knowledgebase" stackoverflow clone for
product related things

Hudson (<http://www.hudson-ci.org>)

Continuous integration (although I'm just now trying to get this behemoth to
start using it..)

------
jasonlbaptiste
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
I kinda want to limit it to stuff in wide usage.

~~~
megamark16
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.

------
nkassis
My list is very similar to everyone but:

Linode(<http://www.linode.com>) dns, hosting. I find them cheaper and easier
than EC2

Dropbox (<http://www.dropbox.com>) Shared folders

Google Apps (<http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html>) Easy
way to get email calendar docs ...

GitHub (<http://github.com>)

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

------
jblomo
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

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

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

~~~
sandGorgon
with unlimited public AND private repositories.

------
benologist
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.

------
billpaetzke
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

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

------
torial
I've had good experiences with <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.

------
dh
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>

------
mcdowall
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

------
tptacek
Github.

Mailchimp.

------
pacemkr
SendGrid - transactional and mass email

PivotalTracker - daily todo

FogBugz - customer support via email

------
bnmrrs
SourceRepo - Git hosting

EC2/S3

Google apps - Email, Calendar, Docs, GTalk

Yammer - Not seriously used

Pivotal Tracker - Managing stories

SalesForce - CRM

------
lfittl
There is a ton of good & well-sorted stuff at

<http://startuptools.pbworks.com/>

Collected by a couple of UK startups (Songkick, Huddle, etc.)

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

~~~
frisco
Not into Quora? As several people answer it opens up a community-editable
answer summary to bring them all together.

~~~
dotBen
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.

------
iuguy
We use:

Salesforce for CRM

Google Apps for Mail, Chat, non-sensitive Doc sharing

Mailchimp for Mailshots

Gradwell for VoIP

Github for source control

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

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

------
sl_
<http://circonus.com/> \- SaaS Nagios and Ganglia replacement

------
SudarshanP
<http://www.trada.com/> Crowdsourced SEM

~~~
aymeric
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?

------
presto8
For backup, I've been quite pleased with CrashPlan.

------
gtani
compare/contrast: 1.3 years ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656147>

------
gubatron
macosx | ubuntu

emacs, eclipse

version control tool of your choice (mercurial | git | svn)

python, bash, java.

a brain.

