When your Site is in a Bad Neighborhood
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of security.
For a long time, I stayed away from JavaScript. I would use it for very small interactions, but for major functionality like menus and UI, I stayed away. The reason was twofold: