Austin Valley Software

Hosted Version Control

unfuddle.com and SubVersion

I don’t remember where I came across it, but I do remember the importance stressed in his book, MicroISV, that the smaller you are, the more important having good version control was.  I started using Unfuddle.com and their SubVersion hosting in the beginning of 2008, and I’ve been very happy with them.  It provides enough issue tracking, notes, and subversion repositories to keep me on track.  I started using the free account, and upgraded to their $9.00 per month plan recently so I could bring on additional users and keep track of up to 5 projects.

I use Adobe DreamWeaver which has the WebDav connection, and TortoiseSVN at my desktop, and the command line subversion on my test and production servers.  Moving a production version to my production server take just one command and a few seconds.

WebMail

AXIGEN Mail

There are plenty of good services to handle you e-mail out their, but if you want/need to run your own e-mail server, and have some Linux experience, check out AXIGEN.  It’s a great product, and there is a 5 user version available for free use.  They have a simple video tutorial you can watch online to help you get it installed and configured.

Hosting / Virtual Servers

Amazon Web Services – Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2

I cannot begin to express how incredibly cool Amazon Web Services and their EC2 service is.  I’ve been hosting on AWS EC2 for a year and it’s amazing.  Make sure you get the FireFox plug-in extensions for EC2 if you decide to pursue this route.  Look for a long post on this subject in the near future.

FireFox Plugins

FireBug

FireBug is a plug-in extention for the FireFox Web Browser which provides you a window to the source behind the site you are viewing.  This is wonderful for debuging your site, or looking into what another site is doing.