Lightweight business infrastructure
Monica and I run a small (niche, if you like) website called Writer’s Residence. We’ve been at it for a bit over a year, quite part time but we manage to answer support questions very promptly and provide, I think, a very good service at a decent price.
We can do this for one simple reason, infrastructure is really damn cheap now. Here’s how we do it.
| Component | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| 550mb RAM VPS with offsite backup @ Rimuhosting | USD37.05 |
| Skype account w/ US and UK phone numbers & unlimited international calls to landlines | GBP6.95 |
| Github hosted source code control | USD7.00 |
| Xero online accounting software w/ automated bank and PayPal feeds | GBP21.50 |
| PayPal payment processing | Expensive at 5.5-6.6% of revenue but stoopid quick and easy to set up |
| Google Apps for our domain | Free (as in beer) |
| Amazing software that continually beats my expectations, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, Linux | Free (as in beer and speech). Thanks! |
| uservoice customer feedback service (we’re trying this out) | Freemium w/ a good enough free account for now |
With all this stuff sitting out there in the cloud and costing us nothing up front we were able to be profitable with our first 10 paying customers. We can reinvest our profit to keep building out the service.
Of course this is really the cheap stuff compared to time and there’s no way we’ve recouped the effort that has gone into this yet but it is a fun journey and as with lots of things in life it really is about the journey rather than the destination.
A further benefit of all this virtual infrastructure is that we can live and work where ever we wish within budget so long as we have broadband internet access, and that is rather freeing.