Startup Next Door

From time to time, I’ll divert from talking business into getting down into tech details, because doing more with fewer servers or other resources will save you money and that’s good for business, especially when bootstrapping.

For this tutorial, you’ll need to be running your apps in PHP and can configure it, and have the ability to install software to your server. If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you’re comfortable with both. Let’s go!

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Early Friday morning, I was thinking that if I could get an instant domain search going, I could hook it up to Hover.com and send them traffic (because they’re awesome) and get some affiliate revenue when someone bought a domain with them.  After work Friday I started coding, and Sunday night I finished it: http://dotcomornothing.com  Ah, weekend projects.

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Let’s face it. We want to make all our customers happy.  More happy customers means more money and fewer complaints.

So what happens when you discover that a feature isn’t working properly in one obscure browser?  If you’re like me, you let it go. 

There are quite a few obscure browsers out there, and my obscure meaning that the percent of the overall users using them is very little: Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, SRWare Iron, K-Meleon, Lunascape, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, Songbird, Beonex, Camino, Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, Avant Browser, Maxthon, and I’m sure the list continues.  Even well known browsers (though older versions) fall into this category: Firefox 2, IE 5.5, etc.

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After using GoDaddy for about 4 years, I ditched them and switched all my domains to Hover.

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When I first moved from a shared host to a dedicated server, and had my sites set up to send email (to customers), I immediately received rejections from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many other email servers (this was before there was Gmail).  The rejections all shared the same reason.  The IP block my server was in was blacklisted.  That means that the IP address of my server was within a list of neighboring IP addresses that was blacklisted.  It seems people grabbed dedicated servers and used them as spamming machines.

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You may not be aware that placing your email address on your “contact us” page is a sure-fire way to get yourself truckloads of spam.  As we speak, there are bots traversing the web, looking for email addresses that have been published publicly on web pages.  These email addresses (and items that resemble email addresses) are stored and sold to spammers.

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When you’re working on a website design or testing a layout, testing it in the one browser you normally use is a recipe for surprises down the road.  Your layout could be broken in Internet Explorer 7, or the JavaScript function you’re using breaks in Opera 9.  Checking your website in multiple browsers on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) will help keep people on your site instead of giving them a bad first impression.

So how do you go about checking what your site looks like in IE7 when you already have IE8?  Or how do you check it on Firefox under Windows if you’re on a Mac? Let’s dive in.

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Today I’m going to discuss two more services for handling your startup’s email.  These options are for those of you who need a little something more in your email hosting.  Looking for Exchange and Sharepoint hosting?  Got it.  Need tons of mailbox space because you never delete email or attachments?  Covered.  In addition, I’m trying to keep your costs low.  Let’s dive in.

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My first startup involved hosting websites and offering email accounts to users, so I had to set up an email server and programmatically add/remove email accounts, filter spam, and knock it with a wrench then mail got stuck in its innards.

These days setting up an email server is pretty easy. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it.

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Back in my first startup where we were accepting credit cards, we purchased an SSL certificate in order to assure our customers that their credit card information was being transmitted securely.

We bought that SSL certificate from VeriSign for $495 per year.  That was 2003.

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