Clouding it up
Useful Cloud Stuff
Here is a small list of some of the most useful tools that we use to help deliver sites and appilcations for our clients. We hope you can use them either as developers or users in your own projects. Every time we have a service we like we’ll post it here.
VPS.net
Hosting on a grand scale or for really small sites. We have our own shared and virtual servers which are seen to by no one but ourselves. They are hosted on VPS.net’s nifty Cloud facility in Canary Wharf in London or in a Datacenter in the US in case you need coverage! Access to a CDN and custom server installations as well being able to run any type of application comes as standard which is why we recommend VPS.net to anyone. We like them so much we carry their ads on our site!
Google Apps
We run a number of company email systems and collaborative working spaces using Google Apps Free Edition for most of our clients and we use the Standard Edition when more users or features are required. It takes the hard work out of setting up and ensures that everyone has a unified online worked space based around their own domain name. Google’s email service can be connected via IMAP and POP3 to Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird and all the major mail clients. It also offers some great SSL security options for those security consious clients and its mail search facility kicks some serious but compared to other offerings out there. The document sharing capabilities allow start ups to share information among employees quickly easily and collaborate on their creation.
We use Google Analytics to provide comprehensive ROI and Data on visitors, advertising stats and custom reports on market data
OpenX
The premiere system for serving adds across multiple websites. OpenX features an integrated banner management interface and tracking system for gathering statistics. The product enables web site administrators to rotate banners from both in-house advertisement campaigns as well as from paid or third-party sources, such as Google’s AdSense. With over 50,000 publishers serving more than 300 billion ads per month, OpenX is the largest publisher-side ad server in the world. You can choose between using their hosted version or opt to download and install it own you’re own server for complete control. We currently use this on the Weekly Wrinkle and our site. It simplifies serving all sorts of adverts across multiple publishing platforms and allows fine grained control over delivery and placement.
Amazon EC2 and S3 Storage
Similar to VPS.net and the original contender in the field of cloud hosting, Amazon’s elastic compute cloud initially was used to supply the Red5 streaming server that was used on Intelligence Squared. Combined with their S3 storage service which allows users to store any number and type of files online on a pay per use basis, EC2 services can be used for standard web hosting that is infinitely scalable and can link with their Cloudfront CDN to serve content fast and effectively to all corners of the globe. Not as easy to use as VPS.net however there are more options and a greater number of third party apps have been created to interface with these great value Amazon’s services.
PBworks
A free and premium hosted Wiki service that has recently evolved to include similar set of tools to Basecamp. We use it here to host all of the documentation for our clients, create schedules and milestones collaboratively work on content website documents. We upload videos, files, design documents to the service which will store all the different versions of our files and the pages we create allowing us to revert or review changes. One of the main reasons we like it is because all of our sites have their own branded workspaces and we can have as many users as we like accessing the service with fine grained control over their roles and privileges.
We are hoping to continue using this excellent service although they have a new competitor in the form of Google’s Wave which will offer much of the same functionality. We’re watching closely as PBworks has now added chat and realtime collaboration on documents which seems to be an indication that they view Wave as threat! Wave will be free to setup on your own server but you have to pay to get the best from PBworks.
Cashboard
An excellent application built in Ruby-on-Rails and developed especially for small service providers like us. It provides features such as invoicing, estimates and time-tracking with client login and employee control. It has helped to simplify and centralise our billing system and more accurately estimate costs for our jobs. It is constantly being upgraded to add new features, interface tweaks and offers Basecamp integration and a secure checkout for those who like to be paid over the web.
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